#'equally good visual quality' as in the given examples would look just as detailed and models are moving in similiar ways

[botwstoriesandsuch]

Hi I was hoping to ask for your advice on writing. I’m trying to write from headcanons to little short fics (like one shots) from the readers pov but I’m finding it difficult to do so smoothly. Any idea how to do the transition without it coming out as a fanfic readers worst nightmare?

Well, I cannot guarantee the quality of my “advice” but I will give it a shot! 

Apologies for you folks that hate my big essay length posts, but I do love infodumping about the writing process :P 

So just click “J” to skip the post (if you’re on mobile...sorry just exercise your scrolling finger a bit more)

- - - - - - - - - - 

So I’ll start with the distinctions between a headcanon and a fic. On one hand, you got simpler sentences, that summarize a broader idea or scene. You might have visualized the entire thing in your head, but at the end of the day all you do is write down a few sentences or pieces of dialogue that give the broader basis of an idea and/or scene. That’s not to say writing headcanons is easy, but it is, bluntly, the simpler method.  

Writing, obviously, is more complicated. Not only are you trying to convey a more abstract idea to your reader, but you’re doing so with more layers and complexities, given that what you are trying to write is generally more detailed. You have to not only account for what your basic premise is, but the method in which you convey it. So, in a “good” fic, it typically doesn’t just focus on the basic “what is happening right now” in a scene, but can give subtleties and intricacies with its tone, themes, point of view, connotation, foils, imagery, symbolism, sentence structure, diction, context, figurative language, narrative, foreshadowing, setting, irony, character arcs, and the thousands and thousands of other layers that go into constructing story. 

And I say “story” there deliberately, as I think the best way to summarize the differences is that a headcanon is a plot, while a one-shot is a story. Your one-shot has the ability to tell different messages, details, and themes, and give several points of interest to your reader, while your headcanon is limited to the structure of its initial premise.

[And before you English nerds bash me for my definition of story and plot, please know that I am using my film teacher’s old definition, which (to quote this quizlet I found) is “Story is all of the elements of a narrative that are involved, both shown and un-shown on screen. Plot is only all of the elements of a narrative that are shown on screen.” So yeah, it theoretically could be rewritten as a headcanon is a scene, and a one-shot is a story, but I’m just nitpicking at this point half of you don’t care and want me to move on anyway, apologies!]

So how do you transition between them? Well, in honesty I don’t exactly have a sure fire way for you, saying I do would be very hypocritical. However, what I can do is point out the “gap” between headcanons and fics, and perhaps from there you might be able to forge your own path..? 

Chances are, if you’re already familiar with writing headcanons, you’ve already knocked out half of the work. See in a story, specifically in our case, fic, you have eight elements that construct it. You’ve got

Plot

Setting

Conflict

Character

Point of View

Tone

Style

and Theme

With a headcanon, (assuming it’s slightly more specific than “Headcanon that this character likes peaches!”) you’ve already got plot, setting, conflict, and character down. 

Plot: being the actual premise of your story. What happens, why things happen, how other characters react, the beginning and ending, etc.

Setting: Being the location and time of your scene/plot. The setting might be a contingency to your story, such as a prison break that takes place in prison, or maybe it is the time that is essential for your High School AU fic

Conflict: Typically goes hand and hand with your plot, although not always (obviously, plot and conflict aren’t essential when talking about fics, *winks at the nsfw side of tumblr*) But if your headcanon does have a basic plot, then it probably has some sort of conflict whether external (The Calamity kills everybody) or internal (you’re character is going through grief)

Character: This whole aspect is practically already done for you. Whether by canon from the video game or media you got it from, or perhaps by fanon, with the collective fandom agreeing on certain traits about your character(s) in question. Obviously, if you got an OC, that’s another thing, as you have to create their traits, and construct a believable way that that character reacts and makes choices throughout your plot, depending on how you characterized them

So congrats! In writing up your everyday headcanon, you’re now halfway there to making a full on fic! Obviously, 50% is still a lot, which is probably the reason you were seeking advice in the first place, so now we should move on to the other half, and arguably it is this other half of elements that give the entire distinction between a headcanon and a one-shot. So in theory, if you get these elements down, you’re on your way to writing that much faster!

Quick additional note: Another way to think of your headcanon is as an outline. While not in every case, a good way to jump from your headcanon to a fic is to stick with the major elements of your headcanon, and weaving your writing style in between. Think of the headcanon as your skeleton, and the story being the meat and muscle. Idk if that makes sense, blame my old English teacher for the metaphor

Alrighty, so for demonstration purposes I’m gonna use the very first headcanon I’ve ever written as a basis. Bear with me for a moment:

“Zelink Headcanon: Zelda Just Wants Some Snacks

Everyone always jokes and adores about how Link eats so much and cooks great food in the game (he’s gotta carbo load guys, he walks like 9 miles everyday!)

However I propose, equally hungry and feral Zelda

After Link and Zelda defeat Ganon, one of the first things they do is stop by the nearest cooking pot and eat

She hasn’t eaten for 100 years!! She’s gotta be starving!

Link just cooks up some meat skewers

“…wait I forgot the Goron spice, gimme a sec…”

But Zelda just immediately snatched it off the fire and eats the whole thing in two seconds

Link keeps trying to go out of his way to make really nice food but Zelda is just like “I DON’T CARE RIGHT NOW PLEASE LINK”

So yeah, their first date is basically just Link cooking Zelda a buffet until his inventory empties out”

Again, this headcanon has already given us half of the answers. 

We got our plot: Link, a talented chef, is cooking food which Zelda scarfs down without fear and hesitation

Setting: They are by a cooking pot, perhaps in the wilderness, away from the prying eyes of nosey villagers. This takes place sometime after the initial defeat of Calamity Ganon.

Conflict: Link keeps trying to cook “good” food, but despite the Princess’ royal upbringing, she has no care for the whole “show” of cooking with spices and garnish. She is starving, willing to eat anything

And Characters: Link and Zelda. You know... (Today unfortunately is not the day in which I construct a thorough character analysis of the two...perhaps one day...)

So, now that we have this, we start adding the meat and muscle of our story with point of view, tone, style, and theme. These elements, could be summarized as your writing style. Yes, writing style is more intricate than those four elements alone, but they do fit in with its broad definition. 

So, in essence, a way to transition between headcanon and fic is to find out what kind of writing style you’re comfortable with. 

How do you do that? Well... shocker, I know, you gotta write. 

Write first, plan the elements of your one-shot later!! 

Allow yourself to write complete utter garbage. I know you said that you don’t wanna create a “fanfic reader’s worst nightmare,” but if you become more concerned with the quality of your content before you even start writing, you will never ever ever get anywhere. You’re gonna be stuck in writer’s block for eternity, so just let the garbage and nightmares out and write. You’ll never improve if you don’t have something to improve from, you feel me? 

So, now that your mind is open and ready to write anything, whether garbage or gold, let us dive in to the parts of your writing style. 

Point of view: Do you prefer writing in third person? First? Second? Each have their pros and cons. Second person is good for your “x reader” inserts. First person is good for your narrator’s characterization. Third person is good for describing elements of your surroundings that might not be inherently obvious to your characters or audience. There are hundreds of other pros and cons to the different POVs that you can search up online, but it’ is ultimately up to you to decide which method you like best. 

When you find the method you like best, make sure you use it to it’s full potential! Use foreshadowing with your third person POVs. Use connotation, and diction to further characterize your narrator in first person. Elevate the mood and senses of a scene when in second person.

Tone: Now, this element is often confused with another literary device, mood. The difference being that you as the author have more control over the tone, than the mood. The tone, is the attitude that you as the author (or as a character/narrator, depending on your POV) have towards something. For example, your tone might be suspenseful if you withhold information from your reader, or if you have a certain choice of diction. It is typically better to look to the type of genre you’re writing for to identify what kind of tone you want. 

Mood is the feeling that the reader experiences from your writing. It’s really much more simple, a beloved character dying give a depressed mood. A cute couple hanging out will give the reader a happier mood. This is your angst and fluff feelings, if you will. (Although, please remember than mood and tone are not a binary thing, it is a spectrum, as broad and diverse as the capabilities of human emotion)

Style: Ok yes this is a bit meta, me explaining how to use style to help you construct a writing style. Blame the bendable definitions of the writing world. So just think of this as the face of your writing. The more obvious and apparent part that is unique to you and your personality. 

Think cake. Your story is a delicious cake, it is a chocolate, Zelink cake. Now, your style is the way that you present this cake. Pink frosting? Yellow? A full cake or just a slice? Chocolate ice cream cake? Chocolate lava cake? Five tier cake? Cake pops? These possibilities are the infinite ways your style will present the story.

Style, sometimes called voice, is the combination of your use of tone, mood, POV, syntax, diction, and other literary device that you commonly use in your writing. This isn’t something you learn, it’s just something you do naturally when you write. It’s what readers will like about your fics, because they like the way that you use this or that, or the way you describe this thing or that person. It’s something that can change and improve over time, but in essence, it’s what readers can read and identify as you, without even looking at the username.

Style isn’t something you have to remember, per say, like other literary devices, but it is something to be aware of as you should try to keep it consistent through your whole story. Sometimes have people have different writing styles depending on their own mood, or what they’re writing about. That is fine, so long as you keep it consistent through your whole work. A good trick for this is to listen to music that fits with the style of your writing. Use that one catchy love song whenever you’re writing cute headcanons or fluffy one shots. Use that anime opening theme for your adventurous fics and fight scenes. This way, you are keep in a consist atmosphere and your brain will be in the “Oh! It’s time to write ____ stuff!” mood. 

So just be aware of when you’re in a descriptive style, a narrative style, argumentative, or whatever style you like using. You style might even derived of the way you already create headcanons!

Theme: This is a big one. Have a cohesive theme can easily bring any story from good to great! I like to think of it as you’re story’s destiny, or reason for existence. 

Theme is an outlier for the other elements in that not only is it not necessary for your fic, it is also not necessary for your writing style either. It’s really not necessary... at all. Yet, people always use theme in their writing, even accidentally. 

Theme is your story’s underlying message, or lesson. Yes, yes, if you paid attention in your basic English class you probably already knew that, but this is a big pet peeve of mine. 

The theme of your story isn’t “true love,” the theme isn’t “innocence”, or “failure”, or “trauma”, or whatever. Theme isn’t a broad idea, it’s a specific question and an answer. 

For example: The theme of Breath of the Wild isn’t “exploration” or “time”. The theme is there is always something to seek and find, so long as you have the curiosity and courage to find it. The theme is despite the eternities of time, we still found each other. 

Your theme shouldn’t be a broad, one word answer. What about love are you trying to convey? What specifically about failure are you saying?

Theme is the entire reason why the entertainment medium exists, because artist found a way to create something compelling and interesting while also connecting them to real life things. 

When you give your reader something to really chew on, even days after they finished reading your fic, then you did a brilliant job. Essentially, you want to use theme in your story because it is what will stick with our readers even years after they’ve read your work.

While that’s all sentimental and sappy, that’s still not your biggest problem, is it? You still need to practice, you still need to learn how to use the things you’ve learned to actually write. So, a summary of what I advise you should do.

Look over and improve your old headcanons, and keep making more! Keep making headcanons and litte prompts, and let them grow bigger and bigger, and more desprictive. This could help you ease into actually writing paragraphs a bit more

Find out what you like to write. Yes, you probably already have a fandom in mind, but think back to those first four elements. What types of plots are you comfortable with, what settings, characters? Genius is only the work of enthusiasm, if you don’t like what you’re going to write, you’ve already failed

Write, write, write. Practice, practice practice. Let yourself write complete and utter garbage and nonesense. Then read it over. See what you don’t like about it. Then change it and write again. I MEAN it when I say you should write garbage. Write a completely terrible, nightmarishly cringe scene. See what you don’t like. Then rewrite it again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a scene or something from your fandom. Let it be your description of a shirt, let is be some cringy poem from 7th grade. Just write and learn how you like to write. It will be so much easier in the long run

Read stuff. The stuff you read usually seeps into how you write. When you get used to reading things a certain way, you usually unconciously try to imitate it when you write. So, got a favourite fic writer? Read their stuff over and maybe even analyze the elements you like (again, think back to those eight elements I talked about) and hey, writers like it when you analyze their stuff so maybe even hit them up and talk? We like book reports we swear, most of us don’t bite. 

When you finally think you’re comfortable with your writings, maybe think about what kind of themes you’re into, or what kind of messages you want to say. It doesn’t even need to be that complex. Could be as simple as “I love this ship because it shows that you can still have flaws and be loved” Again, themes are the rEASON for eVERYTHING in the entertainment world

For further demonstration purposes, I’m going to come up with further elements for a hypothetical fic I would write based on that Zelink headcanon. So I’ve got the plot, setting, conflict and theme down. Hmm... I’ll probably use a third person POV as that is what I’m most comfortable with. With third person, I can better highlight the descriptions of Link and Zelda’s surroundings taking in the atmosphere and the aromas and and tastes. The tone will be more happy, focusing on the fun of Zelda and Link’s banter, I’ll try to create a mood in which the reader is laughing along with them, and enjoying the scene. My style will be more descriptive, again with the tastes and smells and other senses of the scene. However, I might go into a more narrative style for Zelda and Link’s banter and dialogue. While typically some people don’t want to use two different styles, I am personally familiar with the styles and know how to write them so as to blend them together more seamlessly. I might have a hint of angst at the end of the fic, as a little climax, given that the setting of the fic is after the defeat of the Calamity. I might through in some themes about how it wasn’t the material power of Hylia or the Master Sword that saved Hyrule, but the courageous and wise bond between Link and Zelda. Then...idk, a little romatic kiss for resolution because this is a fic and I can throw in some fanservice because my writing my rules. 

Babam! I just converted a headcanon to a fic.

So yeah, go write your headcanons. Then maybe next a paragraph. Then next a scene, and then you’re well on your way to one-shots and chapter fics. Happy writing and good luck!

[juni-ravenhall]

my opinions on mistfall!

under a cut bc spoilers and/or not everyone wants to read :D 

overall experience: 

its fun that there IS a sso cartoon now even if its not exactly amazing quality, and im happy to see if there will be more series or movies after this. it was fun to watch and see sso things in cartoon form too and i wish that we had more already (of sso animation in general). imagine if there had been a ssl cartoon? i also kept thinking throughout this, that it wouldn’t be hard for me myself to make an animated series with around the same length episodes and in a similar quality to this (aside from voice acting and music production), which made me feel a little inspired.

favourite scene:

skye taking photos of blaze and hanging out

positive points: 

i like the background art a lot, i think the style of it, and the colour schemes, helps give the series a specific vibe that fits for an sso series in my opinion. 

i like the concept art (i assume) illustrations which we saw in the recipes and other posts on sso ig, i think it looks a lot better than the characters in the series, but thats normal for concept art!!

the music is really good quality (whether or not its your taste, the quality is good) which is ofc bc its sso - theres already good music and not something they only did for the cartoon but something they care about in all of the starstable media. 

i think skye is a nice character (despite the series’ overall low quality writing) and i like her design. i also think rania’s cartoon design (visually) is cute.

skye and rania being a teensy bit gay (minus points for sso if they dont end up really gay in later canon)

i like that blaze wasnt actually like... mean or anything to skye, and i like that shes a mare since typical stories like this usually have stallions. but i just like that there wasnt really any “ooh difficult horse” things between skye and blaze in the current time of the story, blaze actually was sweet to her most the time. blaze seemed pretty charming whenever there wasnt “omg fire” drama. 

the animation itself (not meaning the details of the drawings or scene timing, just the actual frame by frame / puppet movements) was fine! not amazing, but absolutely fine.

points i have constructive criticism for, which doesn’t mean that i expected more from the series, but that we’re all allowed to discuss the quality and our opinions of media regardless of the target audience, budget, etc:

the writing was childish and rushed - this is not to be rude, but a matter that affects a lot of “media for girls / kids”, and a topic talked a lot about by Lauren Faust (creator of the FiM reboot of MLP) who wanted to show that a show about rainbow ponies “for little girls” didn’t have to be badly written, and could be engaging and interesting. if you watch the older MLP cartoons and compare to the first season of FiM (where Faust was still on the team) you can see a huge difference in quality of the storytelling, characterisation, etc. Mistfall, so far, did not subvert any expectation in the quality of what typical “cartoons for girls” are like, and is reminiscent of stuff like “The Ranch” (french horse cartoon) which imo is so bad that its hard to watch. (and ofc... that goes for a lot of “cartoons for girls / kids”, but doesn’t have to be like that.) in order to improve on this, the writer has to study more on storytelling and study from better writers.

on the topic of being rushed: no, it’s not an excuse that the episodes are short: - you have to ADAPT your storytelling and writing to the length of the episodes, not do a bad job and blame the episode length. being able to adapt to different types of media is a necessary skill if that’s what you work with. this comes down to proper planning and structuring the story and writing in a way that works for the length of the episodes. i don’t think that was overall done well here (at times it was okay), and bc of that, it feels rushed and has exposition thrown in your face instead of being shown through better storytelling. the classic thing with exposition is “show, don’t tell”. this is what the writers/directors should study, or pay more attention to. 

the timing (length of shots, length of scenes, or parts of shots, etc) was rly bad at times and overall unimpressive - this comes down to the skill of directors and editors. to improve this they have to study more on the topic. bad timing and pacing can really ruin a good scene or a good story and make it feel disconnected and hard to immerse in for the audience.

the artstyle of characters and horses is fine at times, but appears very low quality at others (skye’s childhood scene really bothered me bc her kid-self had really badly drawn eyes in my opinion). this, like everything else on this list, is ofc something that appears in almost every single “cartoon for girls” that ever existed. to improve on this, most likely it’s not a problem with the artists but with the budget and the production timeline (allowing the artists more time to produce better quality art and animation), and it can also be a problem with the art direction, if the art directors aren’t very skilled or experienced (i don’t say that they aren’t, im just giving examples of what could cause these problems.)

the character design for all characters that aren’t skye, rania, or blaze was very lacking. none of the not-main-3 characters looked interesting or fun to look at, they looked very dull and like the most boring NPCs you could think of. even though its understandable that the mainest-main characters would have the most interesting designs, that doesn’t mean everyone else has to look that boring. this is an issue with art direction or character design. i think most likely there was just very little time (equals money) put into designing the other characters.

the horse design could be improved for a cartoon that focuses on horses this much. like, horses are a big part of the selling point here, so make sure that their designs and art/animation is good. at times even blaze looked awkward and uninteresting, as did the other horses.

“alonso” looks nothing like sso alonso and i don’t like that they used his character if it’s not going to have anything to do with him. they should have given this character a different name if they wouldn’t make him seem like he had anything to do with the sso character aside from being a male ranger. (also in the game he’s like 22 or something, skye is 15...?)

why did they add a “he’s cute” dumbass fucking stupid hetero comment for literally no reason other than adding a dumbass fucking stupid hetero comment?

considering that they “can’t confirm whether a sequel is happening or not”, it seemed very meh to throw in druid cult magic stuff and not really connect to it and now the series ended? you would have expected to find out more about the cloaked people, the runes, the magic that the ranger guy did, and blaze’s magic in general, and skye herself, why her mom is “a witch”.... thats a lot to throw in while saying that you can’t say if there’s a sequel coming to answer all those questions. (it wouldn’t have been a criticism from me if they said “we’re working on season 2″ or “there will be a comic book that continues the story” or anything that told us that these questions, in this particular iteration of a story in jorvik, will actually be answered. - and i assume they ARE working on the continuation of the story, but i dont agree with that they’re not upfront about it, when they left so many questions unanswered.)

at times rania’s blindness was handled stupidly and i think they should have gotten more consultation from actual people with visual impairment, but i think its still good to HAVE a blind character in the main cast and that it’s not a big dramatic story thing but just an everyday thing. at some points it was fine though; and i personally don’t think the scene with rania being able to see blaze was necessarily a problem - because - a lot of blind ppl can see sharp contrasts in light and dark, and this seemed relatively realistic to me when blaze is on fire. (however, the way it was drawn as if she could see the whole shape of blaze and skye could be criticised for sure, and makes it feel more like “i can see because of magic” and not “i can see bc THIS MARE IS ON FIRE”). 

personal opinion which i said before, but i don’t think rania’s voice fits her at all, and it’s not the voice actor’s fault (i’m sure they’re lovely) but the casting and the directors. from the sso character, rania would seem a lot more lively, quick and adventurous, and not as calm and gentle as she appeared here. she seemed a lot too sort of motherly or just adult, instead of an adventurous teen who runs off on her own to do whatever she feels like. compare in-game rania going “MC, thats a jorvik wild!!!” and alonso going “stop talking nonsense” (paraphrased), to Mistfall rania going “jorvik wilds are really rare...” (calm, sort of disinterested, doesnt seem like she cares that much about adventures)

the voice acting overall was meh. i see this as a direction problem, not an individual voice actor problem (and the writing didnt help - it’s hard to provide good quality acting with a poor script unless you can just toss the script aside and improv, if you have good actors). it felt childish and uninteresting at most points and generic low quality for “cartoons for girls”. from a voice acting perspective i think skye had the best result. anyway, the way to improve this is for the director in charge of voice acting to not direct the actors to perform in this childish manner. (again, refer to cartoons with better writing and better voice acting, that have a very similar target audience.)

ok, i think that was everything that i wanted to write about for now, might think of more later lol

[twentiethcenturymoviesandtv]

Ladyhawke: Facets of Film

There’s more to a good film than a solid story and compelling characters.  Otherwise, it’d be a book.

There’s a lot that goes on in the process of making a movie, in taking a story and putting it on screen.  There’s costumes, sets, props, special effects, camerawork, music, and, perhaps most importantly, performances that best get across what the script is trying to convey.  It’s a project containing a lot of different elements that all come together perfectly to tell a story in a visual medium in a meaningful way.  It’s not a movie without ‘movie magic’, after all.

Of course, some films do better with this than others.

See, the point of all of these things is for one simple reason: to better express the story and characters already present in the script. They are there to accentuate, to enhance, to be good enough to dazzle, but not so good that they overshadow the rest of the movie.  It’s a difficult balance, one that can be achieved if the same effort is put into both story and the actual movie-making itself.

The question today is, is that the case for Ladyhawke?

Does Ladyhawke use its storytelling devices well?

Let’s take a look, starting with one of the most important elements in a film: cinematography. (Spoilers below!)

The camerawork in a film can sometimes make or break it.  When done well, it is breathtaking, when done competently, it is adequate, but when it’s done badly, it’s really bad.  There’s more to camerawork than just pointing it at the action.  There’s a lot to consider.

The cinematography, teamed with the editing process, is designed to evoke a reaction out of the audience.  A good director knows how to use the camera to emphasize certain details, or overall feelings.  The camera is used to help tell the story, while leaving a visual mark on it.  Such scenes in Ladyhawke include the stunning shots of the landscapes, giving us wider looks at the expansive world that the characters reside in.

The camerawork in Ladyhawke is, most of the time, good.  Not fantastic, but good.  Most of the shots are standard uses of the camera to get us to take note of the dress in Navarre’s bag, or the emphasis on his sword.  The long takes in the fight sequence in the climax are notably impressive, building a steady rise in tension, as well as showing off the semi-realistic, brutal sword fight.

There are two scenes, however, that surpass ‘good’ camerawork, in my opinion, and become great.

The first occurs semi-early in the film, when the Bishop wakes up in a cold sweat in his bed.  He sits up, and we are granted a look at his bed and room: above him, carved into pillars, are birds of prey.  Hawks. Given his connection with Isabeau, it’s fitting enough, but then comes another work of brilliant editing.  Right after that shot, there is a wider one which reveals something else: carved into the bedpost are wolves, facing away from him. It’s an interesting and effective way to hammer home his connection with the pair before we even know what it is.

The other scene that I’m referring to is a little longer, but is, in my opinion, the best use of camerawork in this entire film.

It comes towards the end of the film, after Navarre (in wolf form) has been rescued from the ice-water and brought back to camp.  Isabeau waits with him as dawn nears, signaling both of their transformations.  There is an instant, made longer with movie magic, where the two watch each other transform, both fully aware of what is going on.  That moment is full of shots of their eyes meeting, and transforming, never actually showing the pair’s bodies change.  In another film, this edit would be an excuse to show off the transformation itself, but Ladyhawke doesn’t.

By using the camera effectively, this scene takes on a different emphasis, one of mutual love and grief.  This is the scene that fully drives home the couples’ love and separation, and the audience feels it, which, once again, is the point of good filmmaking.

Oddly enough, there are very few ‘special effect’ shots in the film itself.  It’s all very down-to-earth, with no outlandish creatures or large set-pieces. For being a film made in the era of big special effects, there’s nothing accomplished in the film that isn’t done with simple camerawork.  We never see a transformation in full, we only see before and after, with some clever shots in the middle to give us the idea.  While that may seem disappointing, it’s actually very smart to portray the scenes like this: it emphasizes the emotional impact of the sequence, and prevents any ‘dated looking’ special effects in hindsight.  It also adds to many of the film’s unique qualities and elements.

There’s more to a film than the camera, however.  Let’s talk about the rest of the visuals.

While nowhere near the iconography of The Wizard of Oz, Ladyhawke has its fair share of memorable images, notably Navarre’s black armor and gem-encrusted sword and Isabeau’s mid-air transformation into the titular Ladyhawke.

Part of what makes these images memorable are the distinctive looks of the characters, assisting with the expression of the character. Phillipe’s clothing is scavenged, looking appropriately thrown-together and unremarkable, further demonstrating his scrounging lifestyle and ‘normalness.’  Navarre is dressed in black armor, in a subversion of both the unscrupulous ‘Black Knight’ trope and the upright ‘Knight in Shining Armor’.  Neither villainous nor a champion, Navarre is a good man on a quest for revenge, a darker path than most heroic characters in fantasy films.  He rides a black horse and carries a unique sword that he plans to use in this revenge quest: once again, completing a memorable image.

By contrast, there’s Isabeau.

Isabeau doesn’t get armor, but she does get a simple, yet elegant enough, dress, combined with Navarre’s black cloak.  This gives her an ethereal vibe that slowly dissipates the more we find out about her, but still retains her sense of otherworldly dignity.

Speaking of otherworldly dignity, let’s discuss the score, which is anything but.

Now, I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears mentioning again: Ladyhawke’s musical score was recorded by Alan Parsons, and the result is a combination of orchestral instrumental and synth music. Does it fit?

…..Sort of?

Once again, the music is a part of the film’s individual identity, for better or worse.  Sometimes the music fits, (mostly the instrumental bits) but one of the biggest complaints about the film is, in fact, the soundtrack.  Many people’s complaint is that the music is incongruous, and takes them out of the film experience.  On the other hand, lots of people agree that it does add to the ‘individuality’ of the film.  So which is it?

Honestly, this one is usually personal opinion.  Depending on what one is looking for in a fantasy film, people either enjoy the soundtrack or dislike it.  Personally?  I enjoy it’s differentiation from contemporary fantasy soundtracks, but can understand why some would disagree.

No matter which way you feel about it, you do have to admit that it’s distinctive.

The musical score does rise and fall with the action, playing triumphant fanfares over battle sequences and quieter, introspective music over reflective scenes, and it does do what a soundtrack is supposed to do: get a reaction out of the audience, and help influence the emotion in a scene.

Another one of the odd things about this film is the lack of sets within it.

There are sets, obviously.  The cathedral, the prison, the barn, etc. are all examples of sets used within the film, but an equally large portion of it is set outside.  The film feels very natural in this sense, by using very grounded sets, further adding to the relatively realistic tone of the film as a whole.  The scenes in which the actors are performing are very tame, plain, and in a way, more accurate to the period and setting they are actually trying to portray. Unlike many contemporary fantasy films, Ladyhawke feels very real-world in comparison.  Being set in medieval Europe, there are no ornate palaces or magical caverns.  As a result, every set and landscape feels like it is genuine and solid, adding weight to both the story and the performances that are coming across.

And after all, the performances are arguably the most important element.

No matter the thought or quality put into sets, special effects, costumes, music or cinematography, in the end, it’s on the performances to sell the story and characters.  Each individual scene rests on the actors and their ability to compel the audience.

Matthew Broderick’s performance as Phillipe Gaston is charming, managing to pull off a semi-comedic character in fairy-tale circumstances. He’s sly and smart, but out of his comfort zone, rendering him rather helpless at times.  He is a character struggling to catch up with events, slowly becoming a part of the story and learning to do the right thing, even at risk to himself.  He’s humorous and later compassionate, expressive and outspoken to the other characters, and in his private discussion with God.

Navarre is almost the opposite, closed off and mysterious. Rutger Hauer’s turn as a good man cursed is very compelling, portraying both the grim determination for revenge, and the broken heart of one half of two star crossed lovers.  (Special mention goes to the above scene with the mutual onscreen transformation, appropriately heartrending, and his confrontation at the Bishop at the end.)  Hauer also has good chemistry with Broderick, depicting the growing friendship between the two very well.  He portrays the full gambit with restraint, giving the impression of emotion bubbling under the surface until his joyful reunion with Isabeau at the end.

Michelle Pfieffer as Isabeau is haunting and heartbreaking, a woman living a half-life, cursed to be with the man she loves, but unable to have a relationship with him.  Separated from all she knows, with little choice in her life’s direction, she also becomes friends with Phillipe, revealing the sad, borderline hopeless existence she is forced to live in.  (Again, special mention to that transformation scene, and her cold confrontation of the Bishop.)  She portrays a woman containing quiet strength, forced to go on and remain solid for both herself and Navarre’s sake in the face of the curse.

John Wood as the Bishop is appropriately disgusting, an old man motivated by jealousy and lust, taking out his anger on the couple.  He cannot bear to take rejection from Isabeau, and he remains obsessed with her after the curse that he dredges up.  He portrays a man attempting to retain control until the end. Unable to take Isabeau and Navarre’s bond, he attempts to break it, once and for all, leading to his own demise.

Leo McKern’s performance as Imperius is both comedic and remorseful, a man atoning for his past mistakes by trying to help the couple.  He contributes dry wit as well as his sincere services, and his connection with Phillipe allows him to help the couple. McKern shares many scenes with members of the cast that perfectly showcase his gravitas that effectively balance out his lighter moments, rounding out our memorable main cast.

Every character in this film is perfectly realized, coming together as a team against a rotten man.  There is no good vs. evil in this story, only the power of love over the power of jealousy and obsession.  These characters come across as slightly fairy-tale-esque, but slightly twisted in odd ways.  The performances are appropriately subtle and reserved, coming across as very genuinely human and understandable to a very genuinely human audience.

The acting, like everything else in this movie, is understated, and very simple.  It’s not bright or colorful, or loud, or epic, it is very down-to-earth and modest. It tells a compelling story with compelling people, assisted by the work done to make it (with the exception of the music) a very realistic and grounded story.  The performances perfectly match the rest of the movie, subdued, but genuine, and gripping to an invested audience.  Every element in this film is tailored to fit a specific mood, moving the plot along without being obvious about it.

Ladyhawke has been called a cult classic, unpopular upon its theater release.  It was greeted with mixed acclaim, labeled as ‘inconsistent’, and debated since then as to whether or not this film was actually good or not.   Yes, the music can seem a little incompatible with the film, but overall, it comes across as a reasonably consistent, grounded film with a compelling story and characters, and it really works.

Join me next time as we discuss the behind the scenes story of Ladyhawke with a segment titled: Facets of Filmmaking.  Don’t forget that my ask box is always open, and I hope to see you in the next article!

[growingpaynes-art]

The Lion King 2019 Review: What I Liked, What I Didn’t, and How It Compares to the Original

Non-spoilery overview and note to anyone debating watching this- 

If you’re looking for this film to give you something that the original didn’t, you will be disappointed. This is a nearly shot-for-shot exact recreation of the original for most of the movie. There are some minor changes, but no major differences in plot. 

However

It’s definitely worth seeing- once on a matinee ticket at the very least- if you enjoyed anything about the original. It’s pretty faithful to the source material and the hyper-realism of the animation really is best viewed on a big screen. The comedy is solid, the changes they made to the story and characters were good decisions, and as a guy that was literally raised on the original movie and grew up loving every part of it, i did legitimately enjoy seeing this remake with my mother (who introduced me to the original when I was very little) and getting to share this story that I loved with my younger sister for the first time.

If all you are here for is the “Let’s Go Lesbians” guy you will be satisfied

Spoilers under the cut

What I Liked:

The visuals of the opening sequence alone are worth the price of admission. They’ve lovingly recreated the iconic intro nearly frame for frame in astounding detail. It really succeeded in taking me back to my three-year old self seeing the original for the first time on my family’s little box tv, captivated by the visuals and score. 

Timon and Pumbaa were legitimately funny and are stronger characters than in the original.

They kept the aspects of Scar that made him sinister, conniving, and creepy without stepping into queer-coding territory. They also didn’t apply racial coding to him in the overt way they did in the original.

At first I was disappointed by Rafiki’s lack of a staff in the opening, but I was later pacified by its appearance for the final battle. I would however, have liked to see the “oh yes, the past can hurt” bit between him and Simba, which was absent in this version.

I felt that the introduction of the hyena characters in the elephant graveyard was stronger in this version, but i do wish that the chase scene had gone on for longer. It’s significantly shorter than the original, and the cubs don’t fight back like they did in the original.

The hyenas played a larger role where they had much more agency, and the relationship between them and Scar was on more equal footing. Shenzi was an especially welcome change, presenting a truly chilling presence easily rivaling Scar’s. Florence Kasumba’s performance really stands out. Additionally Eric Andre and Keegan-Michael Key’s hyena characters served as quality comic relief without any jokes straying into possible able-ism.

The ‘pinned-ya’ scenes were re-choreographed to be more like two kids wrestling and didn’t have the awkward sexual implications some people point out in the original.

This version offers a quick explanation as to why Scar is living with the pride despite the typical customs of real lions

The mouths were really animated very well, and were for the most part very expressive. They were a bit hard to track during the songs, but generally words were formed pretty believably in their mouths and expressions such as smiles or grimaces were rendered very clearly without looking foreign on an animal face. This was by far best achieved on Timon and the hyenas, but was decent on the lion cubs, Scar, and most of the minor characters as well. The other adult lions weren’t as expressive, but they’re weren’t terrible either.

The animation of Timon, Pumbaa, and the hyenas continually impressed impressed me throughout the course of the film. They were simultaneously the most consistently realistic looking and the most expressive. I honestly don’t understand why some people are coming for Pumbaa and saying he’s ‘nightmare fuel’, his design was both very friendly looking and accurate to real warthogs. He and Timon seemed to be the favorites of both the kids and adults in my theater. 

The short scene where adult Simba gleefully pounces after a pair of butterflies and invites a scared Hartebeest hang out, oblivious to his own  status as a carnivore, was pretty adorable.

Timon and Pumbaa were more or less confirmed to be a gay couple, and are shown with their own piglet during the ending sequence. This isn’t lingered on for longer than necessary, just long enough for you to appreciate how adorable the little striped piglet is, and thus it comes off as more genuine than performative allyship (it’s definitely better than Beauty and the Beast’s “exclusively gay moment” or Endgame’s Gay Joe Russo). It also helps that Timon isn’t being portrayed by a straight guy leaning as hard into the camp gay stereotype as possible. It was a moment that I, as a queer person, actually enjoyed.

What I Didn’t: 

I felt that the musical score wasn’t as strong as the original. I wanted that first note over the sunrise to shake the theater, to bang across the screen in brilliant gold, and when it didn’t, I was disappointed. I felt this way regarding the score and soundtrack for much of the film.

While much of the dialogue matched the original nearly word for word, the delivery of most of it was much more subdued. I understand that they were going for a grittier tone that was less cartoon-y, but a lot of Scar and adult Simba’s lines seemed like they were mumbled off at the end of a work day and they’d just given up on trying to get a better take. Donald Glover seemed to teeter between Marshall Lee and complete disinterest a lot of the time. 

I would have liked to have seen more of Rafiki than what we got, and I’d been hoping for an expansion on his role from the original rather than a reduction. 

The “I killed Mufasa” bit was done very well- Chiwetel Ejiofor’s delivery of the line was chilling (although not as much as Jeremy Irons’), the expression in Scar’s eyes was very sinister, the light of the fire hit him just right. The following revelation of this truth to the lionesses however was bumbly, and seemed like it was originally written to be longer but was quickly and awkwardly condensed. It really didn’t flow as well as the original.

The end battle between Scar and Simba was anti-climactic. The choreography and visuals were much more creative and suspenseful in the original. The blows didn’t really have much weight or ferocity to them, and they didn’t coincide as well with the score. There also was no sick kick move, Scar literally just accidentally rolls off the cliff. The showdown between Nala and Shenzi is far better- it’s vicious and animalistic, with a few shots having them silhouetted with fire roaring behind them, Nala’s massive teeth shown off impressively in profile. 

From the very first introduction of Scar, it’s strongly and very overtly implied that Sarabi is the one that gave him the scar after he attempted to advance on her despite her rejecting him. This is revisited again when he commands Sarabi to be his queen upon his assuming of the throne. She again rejects him. With this moment being played twice, I expected this to be a plant for a later third scene of Sarabi temporarily putting Scar back in his place, or at least threatening to take his other eye, to replace the scene from the original where he slaps her across the face. Scar and Sarabi do eventually come to blows as Simba and Nala return to Pride Rock, but it’s very brief and sort of just a clumsy grapple without a clear winner, and with no reference to their apparent backstory. This comes off as a case of planting without payoff. I expect that either a scene such as the one i described was originally planned and cut for time, or it was thought that the implications of such a scene might bring the film up towards a PG-13 rating.

I wish that in the more harrowing sequences, such as the elephant graveyard chase and the stampede scene, that we could see some real fear on the character’s faces. There’s some really good tensing of the body and some bared teeth, but there’s not much in the eyes. I feel the emotion would have been communicated better if the pupils were dilated, if the eyes were darting back and forth with the whites showing at the edges occasionally, the ears flattened down hard against the head.The child actors put forward some really believable fear and sadness through their voices, but the faces just didn’t quite match it. I do however understand that this is a kid’s film, and that showing a hyper-realistic lion cub gripped with sheer terror or coming to the understanding of the gravity of death is probably too much for most young kids. I personally just prefer to have truly heartwrenching, impactful, and emotional scenes in the media I consume, and I often walk away unfulfilled in this respect (although, i admit i am very difficult to please in this area- i’ve been a die-hard mcu fan for the better part of a decade and i left my first watch of infinity war almost completely unaffected.)

Continuing from the last point- The eyes on most of the characters were very static. They rarely blinked, only really looked straight ahead and lacked any range of expression beyond neutral and slightly squinted. The expression of emotion could have been greatly facilitated by the use of the brow muscles, dilating and contracting of the pupils, more squinting and widening, some side-eye or eye-rolling, etc. Even using some more body language would have made a world of difference (for example- an excited cub wriggling with excitement, his paws shifting and his little butt scooting in the sand because he just can’t contain himself, his shoulders shaking with high-pitched giggles) Emotion was delivered quite well through the mouths, but almost not at all through the eyes. This made the scene where Simba discovers his dead father especially awkward looking. JD McCrary delivers some heartbreaking cries and a few tear-choked lines, and the little cub body shakes and cowers, but Simba’s cgi face retains a completely neutral expression. Its a very cute, and perfectly realistic face for a lion cub, but it’s a face that feels inappropriate for this context. Adult Simba and Nala are the worst offenders in this respect. Simba looks almost like a plush doll, almost never changing expression at all. Nala looks superbly hyper-realistic, but... too realistic. She’s as perfect of a cgi lioness model you could possibly ask for, but because of this, there’s no intelligence in her eyes for some of the shots. It’s strange and distracting to hear a human voice come out as her mouth moves realistically while the eyes retain a vacant animal stare. This is really weird to me as there are multiple moments in the film where they absolutely nail the eyes- the sequence where Simba chases Rafiki through the dense jungle, several shots of Nala sneaking away from Pride Rock by moonlight, the close-up of Scar as he reveals to Simba that he killed Mufasa. The commonality between these shots seems to be strong directional lighting, where light from the moon or a fire can catch the irises and make the expression in them really pop. Closeups of Mufasa’s face showed that they had unprecedented control of the facial muscles- they moved with intricate complexity under the skin and fur- and yet the eyes were blank. It’s disappointing that they clearly had the capability to get the eyes right and apparently just didn’t allow the cg artists enough time to apply this consistently.

The slow motion zoom away from Simba’s face as he watches his father fall from the cliff face is admittedly ridiculous looking in cgi. This “long live the king” doesn’t come anywhere close to the original. Mufasa’s climb up the cliff is pretty good, but the fall feels flat and unemotional. 

The sequence tracking the wad of Simba’s hair went on for too long.

The story seemed much faster paced than the original, and each scene seemed to be too short, leaving me wanting more. Some of the scenes feel awkwardly chopped or condensed, and some of the dialogue is a bit bumbly. This movie kinda relies on you being very familiar with the original. 

[preserving-ferretbrain]

The Precise Moment I Stopping Reading City of Bones

by Wardog

Wednesday, 24 September 2008

Wardog is probably a bit patronising.~

Like all inflexible people, I like to think of myself as being relatively open-minded and, therefore, in the spirit of open-mindedness I recently got round to reading (or rather attempting to read) Cassandra Clare's City of Bones. I wanted to like it, no really, I genuinely did. Cassandra Clare, for all those who have been living under an internet stone, is a pseudonym of a pseudonym, but Cassandra Cla(i)re, back in the day, wrote fanfic, the very popular Very Secret Diaries and The Draco Trilogy, which seems to be no longer available on the internet at the request of its author (interesting that, hmm?). Well, when I say no longer available on the internet, what I mean is ... not available unless you spend about five minutes looking, which I might have just done. For the record, said trilogy is beautifully decorated with anime-style Draco Malfoys and black roses. Awww. She also has a hefty set of pages over at the Fandom Wank Wiki (trust me, if anything needs a wiki, it is fandom wank), which are suitably, painfully entertaining in a "for what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" kind of way.

Anyway, background cheapshots and raised plagiarism eyebrows aside, I really have no strong opinions on either fandom or Cassandra Cla(i)re, but I quite liked the idea that a popular, moderately competent fanfic writer managed to break into the publishing world. Fanfic is a difficult beast to comprehend unless you're right there in its mouth but, as far as I see it (and, bear in mind, if you do write fanfic this is probably going to sound like the simplistic flailings of an outsider), there are three possible attitudes, or at the very least a spectrum with some definable stopping points on it:

1) Fanfic is art, man, art and there is ultimately no difference between If You Are Prepared and Bleak House. They're both pretty damn long for starters.

2) Fanfic is like original fiction but not as good, and is basically written by people who can't get their own stuff published

3) Fanfic is entirely different from original fiction

Since the first one is clearly non-viable, and the second is actively rude, I subscribe to the third. Writing for fans and writing for publication is vastly different, and to assume that the one aspires to the other is rather to miss the point (and, arguably, the pleasures) of fanfic. Even so, I would have thought the gulf between fanfic and original fiction to be eminently jumpable. I mean, the ability to string a decent sentence together is a transferable skill, right. Right? Well, evidently not. To be fair, my problems with City of Bones a are not about the sentences (although they are of questionable quality), they goes rather deeper than that.

The truth is I actually couldn't read the damn book. I had to give up. It's not that it was, y'know, bad as such, although it occasionally was, it just didn't - to my mind at least - make the leap from fanfic to original fiction at all successfully. I know attempting to draw a distinction between fanfic and original writing is likely to get me shot at dawn but it's the only hope I have of articulating why City of Bones just doesn't work.

As far as I could tell from the sliver I read, City of Bones is young adult urban fantasy. The heroine, Clary Fray, (and let's not even ask why an author who calls herself Cassandra Clare decided to call her heroine Clary) is exactly the sort of spunky young thing you would expect of a modern heroine. She's out at a nightclub with her best friend Simon when she happens to witness a supernatural murder. Demons yadda yadda vampires yadda yadda Shadowhunters yadda yadda sardonic attractive blonde yadda yadda yadda wise old mentor with bird yadda yadda. Look, truthfully, I don't really have any idea what the plot is because I only made it to page 63.

And this is the exact moment when I snapped.

"In the distance she could hear a faint and delicate noise, like wind chimes shaken by a storm. She set off down the corridor slowly, trailing a hand along the wall. The Victorian-looking wallpaper was faded with age, burgundy and pale grey. Each side of the corridor was lined with closed doors. The sound she was following grew louder. Now she could identify it as the sound of a piano being played with desultory but undeniable skill, though she couldn't identify the tune. Turning the corner, she came to a doorway, the door propped fully open. Peering in she saw what was clearly a music room. A grand piano stood in one corner, and rows of chairs were arranged against the far wall. A covered harp occupied the centre of the room. Jace was seated at the grand piano, his slender hands moving rapidly over the keys. He was barefoot, dressed in jeans and a gray T-shirt, his tawny hair ruffled up around his head as if he'd just woken up. Watching the quick, sure movements of his hands across the keys, Clary remembered how it had felt to be lifted up by those hands, his hands holding her up and the stars hurtling down around her head like a rain of silver tinsel."

Let's skim all over the things that are awkward about this passage ... wind chimes only make sounds when they're stirred and piano music doesn't sound like that anyway ... how can wallpaper be faded with burgundy ... can a skill be desultory but undeniable ... why does it have to "clearly" be a music room, surely it is just is one ... how many times can you say "hands" in one sentence ... how does she know he's barefoot, he's playing the bloody piano ... and what the fuck is with the rain of silver tinsel...

But, yes, skim all that and riddle me this:

Wouldn't that whole scene be so much better if it turned out be Draco Malfoy sitting at the grand piano?

There's a technical name for what's wrong with this passage. In the industry we call it "blowing your load prematurely" (question is, what industry). Seriously, though, we're on page 63, we've spent all of 20 of them in the company of this character (and, let's face it, he's a pretty, sardonic, wise-cracking faintly angsty type very reminiscent of Cla(i)re's take on a certain slytherin): why the fuck should we be even remotely interested in the sight of him at a grand piano? It's a very senses-heavy scene: we have the sound distant music, the wallpaper beneath Clary's fingertips, and the lovingly detailed description of the ruffle-haired eyecandy sitting at the piano, so there's this self-conscious build up, deliberately (albeit not entirely eptly) evoking something of the fairytale, and what's the pay off? Up until this point the tawny-haired Jace has been a rude and snippy, so it's clear that this little scene is meant to show us a different side of him but character revelation scenes only function when you know the character well enough to experience it as a revelation. This is just ... information, excessively presented. It's like being hit over the head with a neon sign saying: "you should fancy this character now." And for the record, he's a demon hunter, not a concert pianist so there really is no reason to have that scene there except as drool-footage.

Possibly I'd feel differently if I was a teenage girl but I hope I'd have more taste.

What the scene did for me, aside from inducing me to throw the book across the room in disgust, was exemplify the subtle sense of wrongness I'd been getting throughout the previous 62 pages. Essentially City of Bones reads like fanfic - and I don't mean that as kneejerk indicator of poor quality, I mean that it reads like something constructed for a different purpose, functioning on a different ruleset. Leaving aside any criticisms of the actual style, this scene would probably work - for me - if I read it as fanfic. It's visually and linguistically striking - the juxtaposition of scruffy boy and fine old instrument (sorry), the hint at aspects of a character hitherto unknown, the touch of submerged melancholia (playing the grand piano to an empty room is a lonely hobby), all this would be fine if the mysterious pianist turned out to Draco. I mean, playing the grand piano is one of the things that one could potentially imagine Draco being able to do. Well, if you stopped and thought about it for a moment, probably not, because surely wizards have ... like ... magical pianos, or house elves to produce their music for them. But given that Draco is a repressively raised posh kid, it seems to me at least credible his parents made him have piano lessons, even if he hated it. And Draco, being the wizarding equivalent of genetically modified, would probably be reasonably good at it regardless.

I truthfully have no idea what it is that makes fanfic work but it seems to me to have something to do with potential plausibility. Scenes of certain characters doing things they never explicitly did in the books (even if this is fucking each other) resonate with you because it feels both novel and familiar - to continue the musical theme, if I presented you with Remus Lupin playing the electric guitar you might raise an eyebrow because he's far too bookish and quiet, but it would totally suit Sirius Black for example. Or even James Sodding Potter. And such scenes require no build-up because the reader already knows the characters being written about. Equally, dwelling on the details, and presenting very visual, senusous scenes, seems less purple than it does when you do it in original fiction because it helps to establish a familiar character in what may be an unfamiliar setting: for what's it worth, I can picture Draco Malfoy playing the grand piano very vividly. Pale hair, slender fingers, whatever. Fan fiction, even if you're looking at a 100,000 word AU fic, seems to be all about the establishment of moments, which need not necessarily (and probably don't) exist as part of a continuum of moments.

This is absolutely the opposite to a book.

The scene of Jace/grand piano has utterly no resonance for the reader because, well, partly because it's rubbish and partly because no time has been given to properly establishing the character so it's essentially meaningless, but mainly because it has no real sense of its place in a connected, developing narrative. Although the 63 pages I read did occasionally have moments of genuine mediocrity that made me suspect I should try to be more generous with the text, the whole reading experience felt so ultimately hollow I couldn't bring put myself through it. There's nothing inherently wrong with something reading like fanfic - fanfic reads like fanfic and I quite enjoy the stuff - but City of Bones is a work of original fiction, it's a book that I paid real money for (more fool me) In essence, then, it's original fiction without the necessary underpinnings, and fanfic without any of the characters you like. Worst of all possible worlds.

Comments:

Dan H

at 12:57 on 2008-09-25So I've started reading it now, to pick up where Kyra left off (nearly at good old Page 63).

I actually don't think it reads that much like fanfic (at least not like *good* fanfic). There's way too much exposition (fanfic tends to assume that everybody knows what's going on) including some truly wonderful scenes with people actually saying things like "surely you recognise a girl, your sister, Isabelle, is one" (Isabelle, it should be pointed out, is *right fucking there*).

Favourite line so far: "Her hair was almost precisely the colour of black ink".

What colour would that be, exactly? Black, perhaps?

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Arthur B

at 15:32 on 2008-09-25It strikes me, actually, that while most of us have a good idea of what "bad" fanfic is like, good fanfic must by its nature vary widely in style, because at least part of the point of fanfic is to produce something that is reminiscent of the source material, so good Lovecraft fanfic will read different from good Firefly fanfic, or good Pratchett fanfic.

(Which would mean that, say, "good" Cecilia Dart-Thornton fanfic is a contradiction in terms: if it's good, it's no longer reminiscent of the source material.)

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Dan H

at 18:38 on 2008-09-25I think Lovecraft fanfic is a special case actually, because it borrows Lovecraft's ideas rather than his characters. Lovecraft fanfic (and, to borrow Arthur's term, peerfic) is all about eldrich horrors from beyond the void, it's not like anybody writes Herbert West/Charles Dexter Ward slash.

Actually they probably do.

By contrast, I actually think with most fanfic the style is fairly consistent between fandoms (although I admit to limited experience here). Part of Cassandra Cla(i)re's big plagarism debacle, indeed, was the fact that she regularly borrowed lines from Buffy for her Draco fics.

In further updates on City of Bones I've now got past the point reached by our intrepid editor and have the following to add:

Holy Crap the wise old mentor dude is a lot like Dumbledore. There's a bit where he asks the heroine if she wants anything and I *totally* expected him to offer her a sherbet lemon. And if you don't read "Muggle" for "Mundie" every time you're a better man than I am.

Also, some exposition from earlier in the book which I found particularly awful:

"Demons," drawled the blond boy, tracing the word on the air with his finger, Religiously defined as hell's denizens, the servants of Satan, but understood here, for the purposes of the Clave, as any malevolent spirit whose origin is outside our own home dimension."

"That's enough, Jace" said the girl.

"Isabelle's right," agreed the taller boy, "nobody here needs a lesson in semantics - or demonology."

As you know, I *almost* applaud the bare faced cheek of it.

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Arthur B

at 00:38 on 2008-09-26

I think Lovecraft fanfic is a special case actually, because it borrows Lovecraft's ideas rather than his characters. Lovecraft fanfic (and, to borrow Arthur's term, peerfic) is all about eldrich horrors from beyond the void, it's not like anybody writes Herbert West/Charles Dexter Ward slash.

To be fair, there aren't that many recurring characters in Lovecraftian fiction except for the Old Ones themselves, who get reused all the time. And I've lost count of the number of times I've read stories about long-lost offshoots of the Whateley clan or where yet another dozy protagonist realises they come from Innsmouth stock.

I agree, though, that the Lovecraft-tribute scene is pretty unique; I expect this is partly because Lovecraft was one of the first authors who genuinely encouraged people to write stories set in his mythology, to the point of sending them detailed letters showing them how to boost their fanfic to peerfic. Having essentially established the core of his own fandom before he died, that core went on to set the norms for Lovecraft tribute works forevermore.

By contrast, I actually think with most fanfic the style is fairly consistent between fandoms (although I admit to limited experience here). Part of Cassandra Cla(i)re's big plagarism debacle, indeed, was the fact that she regularly borrowed lines from Buffy for her Draco fics.

I would suggest that this may be the result of people writing to indulge the sort of mores that have grown up around fandom-in-general, as opposed to writing to emulate the original work.

Which might explain why City of Bones exists. Once you don't care what the background to what you're reading is, so long as it has shipping and mary sues and whatnot, it becomes easier to accept the idea of fanfic-like work which is fanfic of nothing in particular - nothing, that is, except fanfic itself.

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Montavilla

at 01:55 on 2008-09-28

I truthfully have no idea what it is that makes fanfic work but it seems to me to have something to do with potential plausibility. Scenes of certain characters doing things they never explicitly did in the books (even if this is fucking each other) resonate with you because it feels both novel and familiar - to continue the musical theme, if I presented you with Remus Lupin playing the electric guitar you might raise an eyebrow because he's far too bookish and quiet, but it would totally suit Sirius Black for example. Or even James Sodding Potter.

Sadly, you made me immediately start wondering what Remus would play in James Potter and the Silver Marauders band. He might, ala George Harrison, play lead guitar. (Sirius would be play rhythm guitar and James would play the bass). Peter, of course, would be on drums. Which might explain why they put up with him all that time. It's hard to find someone who's got their own drum set.

Favourite line so far: "Her hair was almost precisely the colour of black ink". What colour would that be, exactly? Black, perhaps?

To be fair, comparing hair to ink is a difficult image these days because we only really see ink in the stems of our ballpoint pens. Perhaps it might have been better to say, "Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

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Dan H

at 12:18 on 2008-09-28

To be fair, comparing hair to ink is a difficult image these days because we only really see ink in the stems of our ballpoint pens. Perhaps it might have been better to say, "Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

Hee hee.

In all seriousness, though, it's not the comparison to ink that bugged me, it just strikes me as elementary that if you're saying "X was the colour of Y" then unless you're doing a Blackadder style joke "Y" should not include reference to a specific colour. "Her hair was black as ink" "her hair was black, like ink" "her hair was ink-black" would all have been fine. So for that matter would be "her hair was like black ink". "Hair the colour of black ink" is like something out of the Bulwer-Lytton contest: "Her hair was the colour of black ink, her eyes the colour of a blue crayon, and her dress the colour of a dress made out of red silk."

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Wardog

at 14:16 on 2008-09-29

Since we're playing Favourite Lines, my personal shoutout goes to: "He had electric blue dyed hair that stuck up around his head like the tendrils of a startled octopus..." I guess it's just the awkwardness of the construction coupled with that startled octopus...

Arthur: I would suggest that this may be the result of people writing to indulge the sort of mores that have grown up around fandom-in-general, as opposed to writing to emulate the original work.

I'm not sure emulating the original work has ever real been the goal, well, not unless there's specific stylistic feature *to* emulate if that makes sense - like Lovecraft. I mean, you want to make your characters sound like the characters they are but ... well ... to indulge a bit of JKR bashing just because that's what we do here, most of the Harry Potter stuff I've read has been stylistically objectively better than the author.

"Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

Hehe!!!

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Arthur B

at 15:47 on 2008-09-29

I think direct stylistic mimicing is, as you point out, actually rare, especially since a lot of fanfic is written about TV series, so you're translating a visual format into a literary one. But at the same time I think that the aim of a lot of fanfic is to emulate the source work in the sense that the writer's trying to tell a story that is a) reminiscent of the source material, in that it establishes a mood and tells a story which could recognisably fit within the source, and b) features the characters behaving in a manner recognisable from the source (unless the explicit point of the fic is something like "What if Captain Lolcats got possessed by a brain worm?"). At the very least, a lot of fanfic authors seem to want to produce something where the reader would look at it and say "Yes, that's very much how it would have happened on my favourite show if the screenwriters had only had the courage to write an episode where the ship's doctor and the robot owl consummate their love".

I say "a lot of fanfic" because I've seen the occasional piece (generally AU fics) where the premise is so utterly far removed from the source material that I start scratching my head and wondering why the author bothered retaining the link to the source material in the first place. Sure, perhaps the characters retain scraps of their personality, but they're in such an utterly different scenario it becomes a stretch to call them the same characters; to my mind, at least, characters are at least partially defined by context. Being a cheeky black marketeer on Deep Space 9 is a very different proposition from being a cheeky black marketeer in Blitz-era London.

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Wardog

at 16:01 on 2008-09-29

We are now mainly haggling over semantics, dear boy.

So instead I would like to play the "Her hair was" game.

I submit: Her hair was almost precisely the colour of one of those motorola telephones, the ones with that come with a gloss finish not matte."

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Claire E Fitzgerald

at 16:32 on 2008-09-29

Her hair was almost precisely the colour of a grey cat in a room that was totally dark, such that the colour of the cat was indistinguishable from black.

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Arthur B

at 16:59 on 2008-09-29

Her hair was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

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Wardog

at 21:20 on 2008-09-29

Oi! Minus three points from Slytherin for being meta.

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Arthur B

at 00:26 on 2008-09-30

“Minus three hundred points for turning the comments section into Harry Potter fanfiction," muttered Harry, glowering at his Nintendo DS. He was pretty sure he was on the right track in this Phoenix Wright episode, but the game was being evasive about precisely which investigative avenue he should pursue. Harry was not looking forward to the half hour he'd have to spend looking for the plot, but he supposed he couldn't complain: he normally had to doss about for half a year before getting anything done in real life.

"How's my hair looking?" asked Ron, anxious about his big date with Hermione. He had spent the last six hours smearing his skin with Hackiburr's Very Useful Ointment in order to conceal the telltale marks of gingerness, and was now in the process of rubbing the stuff into his scalp. Harry glanced at his bare-torsoed chum and then returned his attention to his game.

"Your hair is all carroty," quipped Harry, "like someone was just sick in it."

Draco giggled and ran his hands through his hair, which was bright yellow like artificial egg yolk.

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Rami

at 12:17 on 2008-09-30

I think these are still worse, but you're getting there ;-)

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Guy

at 04:26 on 2009-07-24

Her hair was almost precisely the colour of light with a frequency of 590 nm and a wavelength of 526 THz, and as she moved the angle of its inclination to her scalp seemed to undulate with a regularity that spoke softly to his soul.

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Rami

at 04:41 on 2009-07-24

a frequency of 590 nm and a wavelength of 526 THz

I think you got the wavelength and frequency swapped around ;-)

A redhead, eh? Why is it that female protagonists never seem to have violently ginger hair?

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Guy

at 08:34 on 2009-07-24

Oops, so I did. I could pretend that it was a deliberate attempt to further enhance the awfulness of the sentence, but no, I just muddled it up. :)

It would be kind of interesting to see some kind of frequency histogram of female (and male) protagonists and the wavelengths of their hair colours... but I suspect nobody would be mad enough to actually do the work to make such a thing.

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Michal

at 05:29 on 2011-09-29

And I only stumbled on this when I found out Cassandra Clare will be one of the instructors at the 2012 Clarion Writer's Workshop.

Suffice to say, I won't be applying. (Jesus Christ guys, you had Neil Gaiman and Ellen Kushner and Particia C. Wrede and Gene fucking Wolfe as instructors and now you've had budget cuts or what?)

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Arthur B

at 11:25 on 2011-09-29

Well they also had Orson Scott Card.

I guess it's like Hogwarts. Not everyone can be a Griffindor or a Ravenclaw. They also have to recruit Slytherins (Card) and Hufflepuffs (Clare).

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Michal

at 13:30 on 2012-11-18

There's a movie now.

I think I caught a half-second glimpse of Henry VIII at one point.

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Arthur B

at 14:05 on 2012-11-18

Urgh, they actually say "mundanes".

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Ibmiller

at 15:05 on 2012-11-19

It's like they learned nothing from Golden Compass...

Also, are they deliberately trying to recreate the "awkward teen significantly older British actor" Twilight vibe?

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Wardog

at 15:36 on 2012-11-19

Oh no, that's Jamie Campbell-Bower. Officially the drippiest boy in Hollywood.

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Arthur B

at 15:44 on 2012-11-19

Also, are they deliberately trying to recreate the "awkward teen significantly older British actor" Twilight vibe?

I suspect they are going to mimic Twilight/Potter as closely as copyright will allow. It's got that "clinging to the underbelly of the bandwagon and trying to scrape as much gold as you can out of it" look. (Of course, this is likely to lead to jibbering incoherence due to Potter and Twilight being two different bandwagons...)

The extent to which Blonde Love Interest looks like a reject from the Draco Malfoy auditions is hilarious.

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Fishing in the Mud

at 16:51 on 2012-11-19

The extent to which Blonde Love Interest looks like a reject from the Draco Malfoy auditions is hilarious.

Hey, at least they got that right.

[buzzdixonwriter]

Chillin’ With Netflix (2018 edition)

LOST IN SPACE

Really well done, family friendly space opera.  Top notch production values, good / smart writing, superlative cast.

And despite all this, it couldn’t keep my attention past episode 4.

I put the blame on me, not this new series by writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless.  

As a preteen, I was in the prime target audience for the original Lost In Space back in the mid-1960s, and that series -- despite its wildly varying tone -- created an iconic show that, try as they might, every subsequent re-make struggles to overcome.

Seriously, it’s like trying to remake I Love Lucy only without Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, Vivian Vance, and William Frawley.

Yeah, it can be done, but why bother?  Use that talent and energy to do something in the same vein but different.

That being said, I deny no one their pleasure.  If you haven’t seen / loved the original, try this version; you might very well like it.

. . .

THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE

Excellent production / writing / cast / performances.

I started out really liking it.

That enthusiasm faded.

I ended up enjoying this new retelling of The Haunting Of Hill House but came away feeling it fell short of 1963’s The Haunting, the first and still best adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s classic ghost story.

First off, a definition of terms (which will explain my enthusiasm fade):  In order to work, a ghost story must take place in the audience’s head.

That is to say, the reader / viewer must be left with two equally possibly yet mutually exclusive possibilities:  There are such things as ghost, or the haunting is purely psychological in the mind/s of the character/s.

Even in stories such as the original novel or the 1963 film where the possibility is presented that at least one of the characters is mentally unstable and is either imagining / causing the manifestations, the book / movie / series must never come down concretely in either camp.

To make it purely psychological turns it into a drama about mental illness, the make it supernatural moves it from the realm of “ghost story” into “monster movie” where the monster happens to be a ghost.

A ghost story doesn’t have to be scary, simply…haunting.  Portrait Of Jenny is a bitter-sweet romance that despite a lack of spookiness remains a bona fide ghost story.

(Ghost comedies such as Topper, Blythe Spirit, Ghost Busters, etc. are a different genre entirely akin to leprechaun / alien comedies where a fantastic being disrupts the lives of the human protagonists.)

This version works well, even though it doesn’t maintain the high level it starts with.  The family dynamics are well done, the performances excellent.

For the first couple of episodes the series tries to walk the line, raising the possibility and eventually confirming that mental illness runs through the family that moved into Hill House, but the moment the ghosts begin manifesting themselves, it paradoxically stops being a ghost story and becomes a booga-booga story).  Virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity also works against the production, occasionally dragging audiences out of the story to admire how clever the film makers are.

It also gets a little too convoluted and overly melodramatic towards the end, however (ghost stories work best at their simplicity.

And it is not an upbeat ending but a really horrific one as the family in question literally consumes itself.  

This version inhabits a godless universe, and the apparent “good” ending is really a terrible one of eternal damnation (albeit not in the Christian sense).

I recognize and appreciate the level of craftsmanship that went into this, and recommend it to people who like scary stories.

But it ain’t what I’d call a ghost story, and it sure ain’t what Jackson would call one, either.

. . .

SHE-RA AND THE PRINCESSES OF POWER

I'm not the target audience for She-Ra in either incarnation.

That being said, I watched episodes 1-3 and 12-13.

It looks good to me.  The story was familiar, but like old B-Westerns it's the kind of genre where familiarity breeds affection, so no complaints there.

Pacing seemed slow, but the design and animation was good, voices top notch. Clearly a heavy anime influence.

Really liked the wide range of physical types and acknowledgement of LGBT characters. Lots of fun with the various interpersonal relationships and characterizations, especially Swift Wind, the smartass flying unicorn.

They did a really good job with this show and the characters seemed more like real teens than the previous incarnation.

. . .

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS

Well, this one I can recommend whole heartedly and without reservation.  

Joel and Ethan Coen have shown a remarkable penchant for period films and a strong affinity for Westerns in the past, and this anthology film offers a dazzling grab bag of good / off beat stories that range from the ridiculous to the realistic, though a couple of them are Westerns by location only as they don’t really rely on any of the themes that define the Western genre. 

The stories are:

“The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs” -- a hilarious send up of old Hollywood Western clichés starting with the quintessential sing cowboy trope and spiraling into full bore craziness from there.

“Near Algodones” -- a would-be bank robber has a really bad day.  Despite its dazzling editorial style, one of the more conventional stories -- and yet it manages to evoke both classic Buddhism, the crucifixion, and the ultimate sardonic joke all in the last 30 seconds.

“Meal Ticket” -- a Twilight Zone-ish story about a backwoods impresario and his limbless performer, told almost entirely silently except for quotes from poems and dramatic works and the occasional song.  While it makes good use of its Western locale, there’s really nothing in the story to tie it to the West; it could just as easily occur on a Mississippi riverboat, the back alleys of White Chapel, or the slums of Mumbai.

“All Gold Canyon” -- based on a story by Jack London, it’s a look at how hard and demanding a prospector’s life could be (with a virtually unrecognizable Tom Waits as the grizzled old prospector).  The Coen Brothers use their location to the fullest advantage, recreating the feel of what such land must have felt like before the first settlers moved in.

“The Gal Who Got Rattled” -- the longest, most realistic, and most bitter-sweet of the stories, set on a wagon train heading to Oregon, and focusing on a young woman who is definitely not the sort who should be making such a trip.  While we can look back from our safe vantage point in the 21stcentury and recognize the Indian Wars were the direct result of rapacious land grabbing by Western settlers, this story does an excellent job of showing just how terrifying it would be to sit on the receiving end of a tribal attack.  The ending is a morally complex one, well worth pondering, and especially ambiguous given the nature of the story’s framing element.

“The Mortal Remains” -- weakest of the stories, but salvaged by strong performances.  Another Twilight Zone style story, and if you didn’t guess the ending by the one minute mark I’ve got a bridge in Florida made of solid gold bricks I’d like to sell you.

. . .

AMERICAN VANDAL

Yowza!  This is one of the best series I’ve ever seen, and it’s perfect in damn near every way.

On the surface it’s a parody of various true crime documentary series, especially Netflix’ own Making A Murderer.  It’s told from the point of view of two students in their high school’s audio-visual club who make a documentary about an act of vandalism directed at the school’s teachers and the student who is blamed for it.

Of course, as they investigate, they turn up evidence that the accused student did not commit the vandalism, and in their pursuit of the truth uncover several more secrets on their way to the big reveal.

At first blush, the makings of a solid show.

But what co-creators Tony Yacenda and Dan Perrault manage to pull off with this is nothing short of astounding, a fun parody of a genre that raises interesting questions about both the genre they’re parodying and the issue of truth and guilt, while on top of that adding an incredibly complex yet easy to follow overlay of conflicting characters and emotions.

They get every single detail right, and even seemingly throw away lines / scenes / characters get fleshed out in amazing and unexpected ways (for example, one extremely minor character, with no significant dialog, who appears only briefly on camera as comic relief in one or two early episodes is later revealed to be severely alcoholic, and in recalling his earlier appearances, one realizes the character must be suffering through a genuinely hellish existence).

Dylan, the accused student, starts out as a character of fun and amusement, a high school goofball of Spicoli proportions, only to come to a sad and ultimately terrifying end as he realizes just how dumb and dead-end his life is.

I cannot praise thise series enough.  Very rarely will I look at someone else’s work and say “I wish I had done that.” American Vandal is one of the rare exceptions.

The series has two seasons, the first involving Dylan and the vandalism of the teachers’ cars, the second involving a food poisoning incident at a private school the original two students are invited to investigate.  Season two is very strong but lacks “the shock of the new” that season one provided; it’s high quality and entertaining, but not as compelling as the original.

. . .

© Buzz Dixon

[themangaguide]

That merely in some way existed

Manga Review most likely:

im around thirty and finally in love is the pinnacle of the wonderful manga. It's every little thing: suspense activity, excitment, situation along with just a little love - every little thing that's loaded right into the incredible tale of Eiji Yoshikawa.

That isn't to say this would be to the preferences of every person's. Although personally, I enjoy the sketches of Takehiko Inoue, the symbolism at times is incredibly visual, highlighting on monstrous sometimes. Guts, limbs, brains fly down within fight's heat, the sketches are in fact not so poor it is sickening. You may be leaving this regarding the step if body isn't really your point.

For individuals that do not mind a little of body nonetheless, continue reading, given that while im around thirty and finally in love in the beginning look only appears to be still another manga-based on the period of the samurai, this manga consists of a great deal of level that really injures the audience in.

As an example, in numerous manga regarding battles (and specifically, National comic books aswell) the target market is provided an incredibly global option of numbers - the terrific males ... as well as the lawbreakers. This is not the scenario using the personalities that can be found in im around thirty and finally in love nevertheless. Individuals inhabiting the earth of im around thirty and finally in love's top qualities, dreams, their feelings, despairs, concerns etc.-are all thoroughly recognized that read im around thirty and finally in love manga on the total seems a tinted photo. All numbers have for the important things they do, every one of them have equally bad and the good parts for their personality which simply a lot more boosts the reality the pictures provide their good reasons.

Inside your inventory-regular battling tale the "wrongdoers "'s demise is anticipated, plus one does not end to consider this into detail that is a great deal of. In im around thirty and finally in love when someone lowers down the audience and additionally both Musashi are left question and also to consider his actions' "correctness". You actually experience for these that loss's fatalities. As the monk revealing within the tale, Takuan, claims, all individuals killed by Musashi were that. They're individuals with houses, spouses, youngsters, animals, they're individuals that merely in some way existed daily, or people who had assumptions and also needs.

However the actual cause the worlds strongest fighter who tried too hard living a leisure life in a world of magic is simply a preferred manga of mine is because of the main narrative line, the growth of Musashi himself from the negligent 17-year old youth who falls right into the fight of Sekigahara looking for unparalled power, to some all-round young person who understands just how to pick his battles.

The difference in between Musashi and Matahachi is done. Matahachi and also Musashi, 2 pals, start the manga down on a solitary ground and trigger to become something -"Tenka Musou"???? ('the very best within the home'). Nonetheless private pathways rapidly stray along to acheive this purpose. While Musashi instead makes a decision to commit himself to boosting herself, Matahachi chooses to seek short-lived enjoyments.

Both endure troubles en route and also make mistakes, as well as just as have their particular methods for dealing with this - while Musashi increases over the difficulties he looks and reinforces herself to unbelivable amounts, Matahachi digs herself into right into problem.

After enduring countless battles towards the bitter surface and defeating numerous inner issues (your choice to leave his one genuine love, Otsu to adhere to the lifetime of the blade), simply one swordsman still stands in Musashiis approach ...

Sasaki Kojiro - a crazy and deaf swordsman that actually lives for that blade ...

As the account does pull sometimes (the Yoshioka arc), on the complete im around thirty and finally in love is stuffed high in both feeling and stomach-wrenching sword battles. the photos Inoue presents speak quantities, although it is rather quick on discussion. A picture is really worth this manga as well as one thousand words is just a manga that confirms for this. If possibly additional manga may not be this superficial too. Each amount of the manga absolutely leaves the audience considering following the manga and also typically check out manga online remains to wait on the brand-new chapters. Please visit https://allaboutmanga2016.wordpress.com/2021/09/09/c7kmqqobfe4fze95x03p1631234511/

[sharengayonline]

LG’s leather-wrapped G4 is no dominatrix, but it does dominate

Sharengay Trang Tin Tức Độc Đáo VIDEO LG’s leather-wrapped G4 is no dominatrix, but it does dominate

“The LG G4 is the best smartphone of 2015, and it’s camera is so good that it often outperforms the iPhone 6 Plus.”

Pros

Bạn đang xem: LG’s leather-wrapped G4 is no dominatrix, but it does dominate

Bright screen with gorgeous contrast

Excellent camera performance

Shooting in RAW and Manual mode

Removable battery and MicroSD card slot

Leather battery cover rocks

Cons

Still made of plastic

UX features are a mixed bag

Battery life is average

Speaker quality is weak

“Life’s Good” is LG’s tagline, but life has been tough for the company’s mobile division. Its archrival Samsung has captured a big chunk of the phone market, and LG has spent several years chipping away at Samsung’s mighty presence.

The Nexus 5 and G3 proved that LG could play with the big boys, and the G4 expands on that notion, improving features that optimize the user experience in tangible ways. With an impressive camera and more user-friendly software, the G4 makes a strong case for being the dark horse smartphone that could make waves and surprise many in 2015.

Do the right thing, choose the leather model

To own an LG G4 with a plastic rear cover should be a crime. It’s like ordering a new BMW with a cloth interior: a decision that’ll save you cash on the day, but one you’ll question every time you get in the car later on. Unlike Samsung and more like Vertu, LG has used real leather on the G4, and it feels fantastic; it’s warm, soft, tactile, and classy. It’s a world apart from the cold indifference you get from a plastic-backed G4.

It’s not annoying either. There are never any fingerprints to clean off, it doesn’t cling to the inside of your jeans pocket, and is apparently very hard wearing. For the past few weeks, the G4 has gone case-less in my pocket and bag, and the leather (and screen, actually) have suffered no ill-effects. The leather will undoubtedly bed in with age, but there’s no evidence of that just yet, and it hasn’t lost its sheen.

LG has got the colors right too. The brown leather complements the matt-silver rear controls beautifully, and the phone goes very well with the darker brown leather used for the strap on the gold Watch Urbane. Using the two together looks great, and is one of the first times I’ve ever matched two pieces of tech with each other based on color and material choice.

Showstopping camera

To give the G4 a thorough workout, it recently accompanied me on a long weekend away, where its photographic ability, battery, and general use could be explored in a variety of situations. There’s little to say about how it handles email, web surfing, and calls — because it does them effortlessly. The Snapdragon 808 processor is more than capable enough to keep up, although under heavy usage — I’ve used it for VR in a headset, for example — it can still make the device pretty toasty, but never to the point where it’s uncomfortable or a danger.

The camera is stunning, and did everything I could have wanted. There is absolutely no reason to carry another camera, or even choose a different phone, if photos are your priority. Day or night, inside or out, and in challenging environments it performed flawlessly. There were moments I wanted to capture during my weekend, and I’m pleased the G4 was my camera of choice to do so.

A small concert venue with bright stage lights looking out onto a dark auditorium isn’t the ideal place to take good pictures. Even without switching to manual mode, the G4’s auto settings and the laser autofocus made cool shots possible. Several are shared here, and come straight off the phone. With a little editing, each looks superb.

It’s the same with pictures taken around the city at night, and of sunsets. These were the times where it was possible to play with manual mode, which is hampered only by the fixed f/1.8 aperture — how great would it be to adjust this number? Using the G4 to shoot video did reveal the spot autofocus can be overzealous if left unattended, and results improved when the setting was turned off.

Ignore the slightly uninteresting design

The battery performance has remained steady at a little over a day, but the VR video really did suck the power, and could easily eat 20 to 30 percent in 20 minutes. I’ve also become used to using LG’s Smart Bulletin board, which slides in from the left of the main home screen and shows calendar entries, LG Health, and a music widget. It’s not revolutionary, but it’s attractively presented and easy to access.

Xem thêm: Lenovo IdeaPad S145 Review – $200 Laptop – Gaming Emulation Work Entertainment

If there’s a problem with the G4, it’s that it doesn’t visually standout, despite the leather back and slight curve to the body. It’s very similar to the G3, and can’t quite match the Samsung Galaxy S6 in terms of cool design. Ignore this, choose a leather clad version, and revel in owning a fantastic flagship smartphone with a camera that takes showstopping shots with ease.

Original review continues below:

Curvy, not flexy

LG likes curves. Every phone it launches seems to stick to that design philosophy, and the G4 essentially maintains its predecessor’s overall look. The contoured back is the same angle, and while slightly taller and wider, the G4 doesn’t deviate from the angular top and bottom. The corners are less rounded and the edges slope outward just enough to give it a slightly inverted look upon closer inspection.

Unlike Samsung, LG hasn’t abandoned plastic, nor a removable back. The back is made of a metal and plastic compound mixture, except it’s clear this cocktail is skewed toward the latter. A patterned design is etched into the metallic and ceramic backs to add some flair. Since gold is in vogue these days, LG got into the act and dipped into that as well, along with white and dark gray versions.

The removable back does serve more than a functional purpose for what lies underneath (battery, SIM, and MicroSD), since it’s also used as a way to personalize and augment the phone’s appearance. The full grain leather battery covers are a stylish turn for LG — in a good way. At its launch event in New York, LG noted that it used the same vegetable tanning process for its leather that luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Coach are known to use. Using full grain, rather than genuine leather, also makes the G4 is more durable, so fading and age give it character. Brown, black, beige, and sky blue versions are already confirmed, along with the yellow and crimson red versions shown in New York.

Having all these back cover options means they can be swapped, so it would be no problem to buy a white G4 and tack on a blue leather battery cover later. My review unit didn’t include one, but after some hands-on time with a few of them in New York, I was impressed. The leather is smooth and silky soft. Every detail of the leather backing, right down to the stitching, is well executed. I would likely switch to the black one when given the chance, personally.

On the front is a 5.5-inch quad HD IPS Quantum Display with the same resolution of 2,560 × 1,440 pixels and pixel density of 538ppi as last year. LG gave the front a slight curve it calls Slim Arc, which is noticeable when looking at the G4 directly from its side. The slight curve makes the phone more comfortable to hold in your hand. The screen is also brighter, both by default and at full brightness, a necessary design tweak to rectify the duller output of the G3. LG says it also has 20 percent greater color reproduction and 50 percent better contrast. In our comparisons to the Galaxy S6 and iPhone 6 Plus, LG’s screen definitely held its own or outperformed the competition.

Under the hood

Playing it safe, LG opted not to go with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 810 processor, which has been dogged by concerns over excessive heating. Instead, it’s the Snapdragon 808 chip that’s inside — which is still a powerful hexa-core processor, though LG hasn’t really explained why it made the change other than to say the chipset is “optimized” for the G4’s features.

There’s no doubt the G4 is the best handset LG has made to date.

There is 3GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage to help the cause, along with a 16-megapixel rear camera with improved optical image stabilization (OIS) and a color spectrum sensor – more on that later. Interestingly, LG chose to go with a Micro SIM card slot, rather than use the Nano SIM the iPhone and other Android phone manufacturers are starting to embrace. There is also a MicroSD slot (not present on competing phones) that is technically capable of supporting up to 2TB cards.

I don’t know if the Snapdragon 810 processor would’ve made a notable difference in the G4’s performance, but I had little to complain about with the 808. The phone is brisk, speedy, and dependable. I had no problem doing anything I would normally do on a smartphone. Streaming video was fine, downloading and uploading content was fine, and switching between multiple apps was fine. The phone did get a little hot, but never to a point where I had to question why.

Jessica Lee Star/Digital Trends

Jessica Lee Star/Digital Trends

Compared to the Samsung Galaxy S6, which uses an octa-core processor, I didn’t notice a drop in overall performance. Both were equally fluid in the same respects, so LG may, in fact, be on the right track in suggesting users wouldn’t notice anything unusual. It’s also easier to compare the two because neither relies on gimmicky features, like they did in the past. Hardline smartphone users may notice intricacies and quirks that might set the G4 back, but I suspect the average person will carry on without missing a beat.

If I did have something to point a finger at, it would be the speaker, found on the rear. It’s easily among the weakest links of the phone’s design, and while the G4’s curved back helps the sound escape when laid flat, fidelity is not in the same league as the HTC One M9.

Software

The DT Accessory Pack

Up your game and the get the most out of your gear with the following extras, hand-picked by our editors:

Creative Sound Blaster Roar: Portable Speaker ($130)

SanDisk – Ultra 128GB microSDXC ($90)

LG G4 Spigen Case ($21)

LG has taken a restrained approach to its software this year, like Samsung. Running on Google’s Android Lollipop 5.1 operating system out of the box, LG’s UX 4.0 user interface features are blended in so everything remains simple. The idea was to include features that make life with the phone easier. Some of LG’s better ideas include faster scrolling through the Gallery app and Event Pocket, an app that can unify calendars from various apps into one place. Those who live and die by their calendars may find this a convenient way to aggregate Facebook event invites with details that can be dragged and dropped from other messaging apps.

Smart Notice is supposed to be more personalized and contextual, offering more than simple weather and traffic updates. By learning my habits, it would ostensibly know that I don’t have to commute to work (I work from home), and prioritize weather and phone usage alerts instead. Perhaps it needed more time to get to know me, because I found it to be too predictable every day, regardless of where I was or what I was doing.

Xem thêm: Mở hộp đánh giá nhanh Nokia 7.2: Năm 2019 vẫn dùng Snapdragon 660???

The Quick Help widget is found as a question mark next to Smart Notice. It’s designed to be a mini search engine for the G4 itself, but for whatever reason, none of the queries I tried yielded results. Simple things like “calendar” and “color spectrum” drew blanks.

The true value in LG’s software experience is the bare minimum of alterations it offers. Icons and menus clearly received the Lollipop treatment with flatter designs and vibrant colors. The Settings menus are clear, concise, and easy to navigate. There’s a level of simplicity here that’s easy to appreciate, even if it’s not always patently obvious. I liked the general look and feel of the software more than any features LG added because its apps and features didn’t impact on my daily usage like they were intended to, and tended to only work with other LG apps. Not everyone wants to use LG Health or LG’s Music app. Some of us use Moves and Spotify. In any case, if you ignore some of LG’s apps, much like you’ve ignored some of Samsung or Apple’s apps, you’ll be better off.

This might be the best smartphone camera

The G4’s camera is unquestionably its crowning feature — And it should be, considering that it sports a 16-megapixel sensor, an f/1.8 aperture lens with OIS 2.0 built-in, and a color spectrum sensor. The latter feature is unique to smartphones, and its purpose is to measure the ambient lighting conditions from both the source of the light and where objects are reflected in the scene. This is on top of the sensor’s ability to capture more realistic color tones.

The G4 has one of the best smartphone cameras on the planet.

These features, coupled with the excellent controls in Manual mode, give the G4 one of the best smartphone cameras on the planet. Focusing is very quick, particularly when conditions are bright enough for the lens and sensor to lock on. The Depth of field capturing is impressive, despite the lack of any real optical zoom. And yes, color composition is superb, producing not only vibrant images, but consistently good ones that maintain their tonality after being transferred or shared.

Low-light shooting is perhaps the best available on any smartphone at this point and time, but there is a catch. LG keeps things basic with three distinct shooting modes: Simple, Auto, and Manual. The first two are very similar, except that Auto shows the heads-up display options. White balance, ISO, and shutter are automatically chosen, like any other smartphone camera does. LG claims that users can still expect better results because the color spectrum sensor is still doing its thing. This is generally true, but to fully appreciate what the camera and sensor are capable of, it’s best to learn the Manual mode.

Here, I could toggle the white balance, ISO, shutter, metering, and choose between auto-exposure lock (AE-L) or manual focus (MF). Adjusting any of the settings shows what the photo would look like in real time. Users who might be intimidated by going manual may find that one factor to be the most inviting. Even someone with years of photography experience like myself very much appreciated seeing that.

The photos the G4 captured were impressive across the board. Being able to shoot in RAW was even better, given how much extra detail the sensor was able to take in.

Video capture in 4K or 1080p is fine. You can’t really tinker with image settings before shooting a clip though. I tried to set up a low-light video clip by toggling the different metrics, but once I tap record, everything went automatic, so it was all for naught.

Battery life

Samsung got some flak for not going with a removable battery, whereas LG may earn praise for sticking with it. That’s subjective, of course, since replacing a battery isn’t something every user feels the need to do. The 3,000mAh battery inside performs well enough, but I wouldn’t consider it to exceptionally good. Basic usage saps little, but once more intensive tasks come into play, the juice starts dripping noticeably.

Jessica Lee Star/Digital Trends

Jessica Lee Star/Digital Trends

Not to say that the G4 guzzles battery life because it’s not that bad, it’s only that intensive tasks seem to take more out of the processor than LG lets on. For example, streaming video remotely via Plex chomped on my battery life by a noticeable margin. Even when I initially set up the phone, I lost 20 percent in less than two hours because of everything that had to be downloaded and installed. Overall performance is fine, but for very intense processes, the G4 fares no better than its competitors.

Conclusion

There’s no doubt the G4 is the best handset LG has made to date, not just because of the components, but also because of the thoughtfulness that went into it. Little things, like a brighter screen with better contrast, prettier interface, and useful software tweaks, stood out because I interacted with them every day. For me, the curved back and edges made it easier to pick up the phone off the table, as well, and hold it. The Knock On double tap to wake from sleep has always been a useful feature. Double pressing the volume down button to instantly launch the camera was great for snapping selfies.

I can forgive the plastic design because real leather is an alternative. If not for that, I would dock LG for taking the easy way out. Using real leather in a way that doesn’t cut corners sends the right message, much like the other moves made with the G4. Whether or not consumers will take it to heart and splurge for the G4 is going to be interesting to watch, but we haven’t been this impressed with a smartphone, and it’s camera, for some time.

Highs

Bright screen with gorgeous contrast

Excellent camera performance

Shooting in RAW and Manual mode

Removable battery and MicroSD card slot

Leather battery cover rocks

Lows

Still made of plastic

UX features are a mixed bag

Battery life is average

Speaker quality is weak

Editors’ Recommendations

This outrageously powerful microscope is made of LEGOs and smartphone lenses

Best 4th of July phone sales and deals for 2021

LG Gram 17 (2021) review: Large and light on its feet

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Best cheap 4K TV deals for July 2021

Nguồn: https://sharengay.online Danh mục: Công Nghệ

LG’s leather-wrapped G4 is no dominatrix, but it does dominate

from Sharengay Trang Tin Tức Độc Đáo VIDEO https://bit.ly/3jFLzlf via IFTTT

[michaelandy101-blog]

Infographic Resumes: 6 Hiring Managers Weigh In

New Post has been published on https://tiptopreview.com/infographic-resumes-6-hiring-managers-weigh-in/

Infographic Resumes: 6 Hiring Managers Weigh In

The trendy job search is extremely aggressive, and technology has made it simpler on your resume and job utility to be neglected and discarded earlier than you even make it to the interview.

Fortunately, expertise is additionally right here to assist. There is not any longer a template for how one can apply for a job — you should utilize social media, web sites, and even interactive campaigns to get your title observed by a recruiter.

One resume format you could not have thought of? Infographics. A extremely participating and visually interesting infographic that explains your abilities and may make it easier to stand out within the crowd and function a piece pattern when making use of for a job.

It is vital to notice that an infographic resume will not be applicable for all job purposes. If you happen to submit a resume on this format by an automated system, you might disqualify your self if the expertise cannot learn visible info, so it is best to stay to the format prescribed by the job posting.

Moreover, whereas an infographic resume is perhaps a good suggestion for a extra design-related position, it is seemingly not a good suggestion for many non-design roles. Right here, we’ll discover what six hiring managers must say about infographic resumes — plus, how one can make one for your self.

The way to Make an Infographic Resume

1. Begin with a very good construction. 

You will need to begin by determining which device you are going to use to create your infographic. You may select to create one in Powerpoint, or use pre-made infographic resume templates on a design web site like Canva or Venngage. 

When you select your device, you may need to determine a very good construction. Would you like your title and a quick opening description on the high? Would you favor to place the Training part initially, or finish? Are you going to incorporate earlier positions, or concentrate on simply the present one? 

Moreover, you may need to work out whether or not you are going to focus extra on icons and pictures, or information. 

As an example, check out the variations between these two Venngage infographic resume templates: 

Within the first Kyle Fisher instance, you may see he is structured it so there’s loads of white area; he is additionally highlighted inventive and software program abilities, and left area for hobbies. 

Within the second Linda Jackson instance, then again, you may see technical abilities and academic coaching take up the vast majority of the area on the resume, together with work expertise on the backside. 

When evaluating these two infographic resumes, you may see the construction is vastly totally different. Equally, think about the position for which you are making use of and which info is important to reveal in your resume because it pertains to the position — and which you’ll skip. 

2. Pay attention to every thing you need to embody in your infographic resume. 

As soon as you have chosen a construction, pull up an current resume and pay attention to every thing you need to switch over to the infographic resume. 

As an example, if you’d like your infographic resume to be data-heavy, write down a couple of key metrics associated to your present position, similar to “43% YoY growth” or “12% increase in MRR”. It is simpler to design your infographic resume as soon as you already know what you may want to incorporate. 

three. Select a very good coloration scheme. 

A cohesive coloration scheme is a important element of any good design, and that is no exception. Think about using clear, complementary colours — like white, black, and orange, or yellow and teal — to assist your resume stand out with out turning into too distracting. 

four. Have a robust opener. 

It is a finest apply for any resume, however notably for an infographic, you may need to begin with a very good, highly effective opener. Within the examples beneath, as an example, I put: “Passionate, creative, and driven Elon graduate with leadership experience and strong communication skills.” 

Finally, your opener is your worth proposition — what’s going to you convey to the position that the hiring supervisor cannot discover elsewhere? 

5. Use good design ideas. 

Lastly, an infographic resume ought to use the identical design ideas as anything. 

These embody: 

Creating steadiness, utilizing both symmetrical or asymmetrical designs. 

Leveraging distinction to spotlight sure components. 

Utilizing motion to create a story and supply a high-quality person expertise. 

Guarantee there’s unity in your design — i.e. your composition’s components are in settlement. 

Check out The whole lot You Must Know In regards to the Rules and Forms of Design for extra info concerning design ideas.

6 Hiring Managers’ Opinions on the Infographic Resume

To discover when — if ever — infographic resumes are a good suggestion, I reached out to a couple HubSpot recruiters to get their take. 

Kenny Nestle, a HubSpot G&A Recruiter, advised me: “I personally love infographic resumes. It’s different and stands out from your typical resume, and it’s easy on the eyes.”

Nestle provides, “I’ve had candidate share graphics on the types of roles they’ve supported, as well as metrics related to their current role.”

Devon Brown, an Govt Recruiting Supervisor at HubSpot, echoes Nestle’s perspective, telling me, “I love when candidates use infographics as an opportunity to highlight their creative or design abilities.”

Nonetheless, she urges candidates to make sure their design is clear and simply digestible. “It needs to be formatted in a method that makes it simply as straightforward to learn as a typical resume,” Brown advises. “The flow of information, and how it’s presented, is critically important if a candidate chooses to go this route.”

Not each recruiter feels that infographics are a good suggestion. Technical Recruiter Sarah Magner, as an example, says, “I could see why people applying for design, marketing, or branding roles might use an infographic to set themselves apart, but I’ve always found them to be a bit distracting. Plus, the graphics can take away from the actual content on the resume.”

“I’d prefer an easy-to-read resume over a pretty one,” Magner provides. 

Tríona O’Sullivan, HubSpot’s International Advertising Recruiter, agrees with Magner that infographic resumes are sometimes not a good suggestion. She advised me, “It can be great to see the creative side, but sometimes a candidate can spend so much time designing the template that they miss out on key information, details aren’t aligned, or there are really obvious spelling and grammar issues in the mix.”

O’Sullivan provides, “Given how competitive and busy the job market is today, it’s more important to ensure your resume is easy to review, and states your experience and achievements clearly and quickly, since that’s what someone is going to look for first when reviewing.”

Amelia Towle, HubSpot’s Head of Model Infrastructure & Design Workforce Supervisor, spoke together with her Design crew on the potential deserves of an infographic resume, however agrees that it is sometimes not a good suggestion. Towle advised me, “If I think about the purpose of a resume, it’s a document that your intended audience typically wants to scan as quickly as possible to glean information in an efficient way. If you drastically alter the format, you are perhaps forcing extra cognitive load on a busy recruiter who is just trying to narrow down a potentially vast pool of applicants.”

Moreover, Towle advised me that if an enormous firm is utilizing software program to scan resumes, altering the format may consequence within the resume being unattainable for the scanner to interpret. 

Finally, she believes infographics are sometimes unwise, except it suits the enterprise for which you are making use of: “If it’s a huge HubSpot-sized organization, you might be shooting yourself in the foot by altering format beyond what is expected. But if it’s a tiny agency that is solely design-focused, it might be helpful to stand out.”

Towle provides, “Infographics-for-the-sake-of-infographics has arguably had its day, so in that case, you might want to conceive of something new.”

Lastly, there are some recruiters who do not essentially care by some means. As HubSpot Advertising Recruiter Erica Matos advised me, “I don’t really care about what a resume looks like — instead, I look at the content and make sure they have experience that aligns with what I’m looking for. I’d always love something visually appealing, but if I can’t clearly gauge the candidate’s actual experience, it’s not going to help them get the job.”

You will solely need to create an infographic resume if it is sensible for the position. If the position is design-related, then an infographic resume will help you show a few of your abilities.

Nonetheless, even when the position is design-related, there are some dangers related to infographic resumes — together with problem downloading or viewing throughout gadgets, and the design components detracting from the resume itself. 

For that reason, you may think about various strategies to showcase your abilities.

As an example, O’Sullivan advised me, “While I don’t love super creative infographic style resumes, I love when someone hyperlinks to their portfolio or website, etc. That’s an amazing way to showcase both their experience and their thought process when it comes to applying for roles. If I see a hyperlink for one, 99% of the time, I will go and check that out.”

If you happen to do select to create an infographic resume, check out a couple of of those examples for inspiration. 

Infographic Resume Examples

1. The colourful, graphic-heavy infographic resume. 

The resume I created beneath makes use of loads of visuals and numbers to spotlight related info. As an example, there is a graph to showcase the weblog posts I’ve written which have earned a spot on the primary web page of Google; there’s a big “12” to spotlight the years of content material creation underneath my belt; and there is even a picture of 10 stick figures to reveal my individuality. 

Think about the way you may use one font, and a complementary coloration palette, to create an identical infographic. I designed this one utilizing certainly one of HubSpot’s free infographic templates, so be happy to create the identical one utilizing the templates, as effectively. 

2. The info-heavy infographic resume. 

Within the following infographic resume (additionally created utilizing HubSpot’s templates), you may see I’ve highlighted most of my accomplishments utilizing information — such because the 45% YoY progress, 1,400 extra subscribers, or 24,000 hours managing deadlines. 

I additionally used icons of a smiley-face, pencil, and painter to reveal a few of my abilities in additional visible kind. 

What do you assume? Able to take your resume to the following stage? Seize some starter templates beneath.

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[yourhealthmattersblog]

After sustaining many duels

Manga Review probably:

read manga online is the peak of the remarkable manga. It's every little thing: suspense activity, excitment, dilemma in addition to only a little love - whatever that's filled right into the incredible story of Eiji Yoshikawa.

That isn't to claim this would be to the choices of everyone's. Although personally, I appreciate the sketches of Takehiko Inoue, the meaning sometimes is very visual, highlighting on grotesque in some cases. Digestive tracts, limbs, minds fly down within battle's warmth, the sketches are in fact not so bad it is sickening. You may be leaving this concerning the walk if body isn't absolutely your point.

For individuals that do not mind a little of body nonetheless, proceed reading, given that while read manga online in the starting look only appears to be still one more manga-based on the duration of the samurai, this manga includes a lot of level that really harms the target market in.

As an example, in many manga pertaining to fights (and also specifically, National comic books aswell) the audience is provided an exceptionally universal option of figures - the excellent men ... and also the bad guys. This is not the circumstance utilizing the personalities that can be found in read manga online however. Individuals inhabiting the earth of read manga online's qualities, desires, their feelings, despairs, fears etc.-are all diligently realized that read read manga online manga on the overall appears to be a tinted image. All figures have for things they do, all of them have similarly poor and the excellent elements for their personality which just a lot more raises the truth the photos provide their good factors.

Inside your inventory-regular battling tale the "wrongdoers "'s demise is anticipated, plus one doesn't finish to consider this into detail that is a great deal of. In read manga online when someone minimizes down the target market as well as additionally both Musashi are left question as well as to consider his activities' "correctness". You actually experience for these that fall's fatalities. As the monk revealing within the story, Takuan, declares, all people murdered by Musashi were that. They're individuals with homes, spouses, youngsters, pets, they're people that simply in some way existed daily, or people that had assumptions and desires.

Nonetheless the real cause demonic housekeeper manga is just a favorite manga of mine is because of the key story line, the growth of Musashi himself from the reckless 17-year old young people who falls directly right into the battle of Sekigahara looking for unparalled power, to some well-shaped young adult that comprehends simply exactly how to select his battles.

The difference between Musashi as well as Matahachi is done. Matahachi as well as Musashi, two friends, start the manga down on a solitary ground and also trigger to become something -"Tenka Musou"???? ('the greatest within the property'). However specific paths promptly roam along to acheive this objective. While Musashi rather decides to devote himself to boosting herself, Matahachi determines to seek momentary satisfaction.

Both withstand difficulties en route and also make errors, and equally have their specific techniques for dealing with this - while Musashi increases above the difficulties he looks and also enhances herself to unbelivable amounts, Matahachi digs herself into right into problem.

After sustaining many duels in the direction of the bitter coating as well as defeating numerous inner problems (your choice to leave his one genuine love, Otsu to follow the lifetime of the blade), simply one swordsman still stands in Musashiis method ...

Sasaki Kojiro - a foolish and deaf swordsman who really lives for that blade ...

As the account does draw often (the Yoshioka arc), on the total read manga online is stuffed high in both sensation as well as stomach-wrenching sword battles. the pictures Inoue gifts speak volumes, although it is fairly short on discussion. A photo is absolutely worth this manga and one thousand words is simply a manga that attests for this. If maybe extra manga could not be this shallow as well. Each quantity of the manga truly leaves the target market pondering following the manga and typically read manga online remains to wait for the new phases. For more useful reference, kindly visit this link - https://yourhealthmattersblog.my-free.website/hwlbqsphkxtnv0kjuo171624445136

[okimargarvez]

BAD TIMING

Original title: Cattivo tempismo.

Prompt: fluff, fear of love.

Warning: post 13x5.

Genre: comedy, romantic, angst, friendship.

Characters: Penelope Garcia, Luke Alvez, JJ, Derek Morgan, O.C. (Luke’s mom).

Pairing: Garvez.

Note: oneshot 12 in Garvez collection.

Legend: 💏😘👓🎈.

Song mentioned: Difendimi per sempre, Tiziano Ferro.

MY OTHER GARVEZ STORIES

This story is dedicated to my sister of delirium @theshamelessmanatee

BAD TIMING

 He has been waiting for this moment for a century or so. The ability to replicate what had already happened months ago, going beyond. And it's (was) all sadly perfect.

It's shabby, indeed, really sad that he needed to find out that Penelope's date was ended with a gunshot, to decide to find the courage to face his feelings and finally ask her out.

Technically he hadn't asked her anything yet. But he had prepared everything else.

Flowers. It took a whole day to decide first whether to buy flowers or if such a gesture would be interpreted in negative; he remembered Garcia's words perfectly when she admitted to practicing non-violence in her food choices, but he didn't know if this concept was true for plants as well. So, he had opted for a circumspectly collection of information. Starting from JJ. He had simply asked her if Will had given her flowers often, before they married, if it had been a gesture woman would have appreciated nowadays or if it had become a retro romance. The blonde of course had looked at him strangely, but the man was quick to explain that one of his cousin was in a very bad mood and he just wanted to help her. He was not sure that Agent Jaerau had been bought his story.

Then he had done the same thing with his mother. He had called her and had asked her more or less a similar question. But the old woman had been much more alert and straightforward than her colleague. -Ninito, if you want some advice to ask a date with a girl, tell me clearly! Don't make fun of your mother, don’t treat me like I were a stupid and naive lady!- so, Luke found himself with a more serious problem to solve, to apologize to his mother and regain her love. And there had been no better way than to admit everything.

-Ok. There's a woman, I've already told you about her...- she had interrupted him almost immediately.

-Penelope.- she had simply limited to saying. If he could have looked at her, he would probably have looked at her like an alien creature. But he had had to make do with a strangled cry, followed by a prolonged silence. -Son?- the other had asked.

-When you have taking a profiling course? How do you know it's about...- he was almost afraid to say the name of the computer technician -...Penelope?- his mother had let herself go to a short, liberating laugh.

-Ninito, you came out of my belly! Don't forget it.- if his father had still alive, he would surely blush. Despite the Catholicism in which she was born and grew up, and in which she believed deeply, Adriana was a woman capable of pungent and witty jokes, to go beyond a simple morality and didn't have trouble saying what she thought. Never, not even at her child. -I certainly don't need to take a course to psychoanalyze you. It's the colleague of which you told me about most. And it's not just a question of quantity, but also of quality. You should listen to yourself, really, I'm not kidding, you should try. You should really hear yourself talking about her, her skills that made you solve a case brilliantly, you should be able to hear your enthusiasm when you told me about the moment she met Roxy "the smile she did... the whole world was absorbed from that smile", your words. Or when you told me that you tried to console her and bought her that anti-stress puppet, or... - hearing a different point of view, of a person who was completely extraneous because too distant, had given a decisive shock to agent Alvez.

-Ok, enough, enough. I get your drift.- Adriana had laughed again.

-You deal with bombs, serial killer every day and a sweet blonde makes you shake like a schoolboy on his first day of school?- she had slightly teased him, as only a parent is authorized to do. -You're exactly like your father.- and this was certainly not the first time she told him.

-So, how Dad did get married to you?- or that Luke asked her this question.

-I had to make the first move, you know very well. Now, gather all your courage and try. Which woman could resist my child's charm? I still want so many beautiful nephews and I feel I have never been so close to realize the dream... please, don't ruin everything.- while he listening to the voice of the woman, he had noticed out of the corner of his eye a great movement. It was Roxy who wanted to go out for a walk.

-Well, mom, now I have to go. My girlfriend claims me.- he had distinctly heard Adriana's snort.

-Look that mine wasn't a suggestion, but an order.- a last attempt.

This time he had been the first to laugh. -I know. I love you, don't go to sleep too late!- while the old woman closed the call he had managed to hear her still mumble something like "Look if at my age I have to be treated like I was the daughter”.

 His mother's words had bounced in his head for a long time. He had finally decided that the flowers would be a good choice. After all, JJ also confirmed that women still liked that kind of attention. So, weeks passed, from that telephone conversation, and several occasions presented themselves before him.

The first was undoubtedly the time when Garcia decided to change his nickname, from Newbie to "Cool Hand Luke", provoking in him a tumult of emotions; first because he had asked himself the reason for this nickname, she had had no way to find out if his hands had a classic hot temperature or the opposite, then he had visualized clear immediately the image of his own hands that passed form her shoulders and back in other areas... But next to him was JJ, who had looked at him and she had also asked "What did you do to her?" after the bespectacled blonde had greeted them with yet another ambiguous joke "I'm the genie in genealogie, just rub my lamp".

He could go to her, after the case was over. And finally ask her out. But he had backed up. Any excuse was good not to take that fateful step. The terror (not fear) to receive a no was louder than any good perspective would open with a yes.

 When, however, Luke sees Garcia almost running away, during the exposure of the case of the cannibal of Bridgewater, he understands that this time the situation is different. There is something serious behind a similar output. He stays perhaps longer than the others staring at the spot where she disappeared. But he turns in time to hear the explanation given by their leader.

The words come to him broken, confused, as if his ears refuse to accept this fact.

A man (call him that) had shot to Garcia while, ten years ago, they had worked to this case.

His first thought is precisely about the timing. Ten years earlier, when I still didn't know her. When I don't even know she existed. And where was he, what was he doing while she tinged with red the steps to her apartment building? JJ was in fact the one responsible for adding details. The name, for example, but this doesn't ring a bell; his profession: ranger, policeman with a several medals. Ranger, like him. He could have known him, talked with him, had lunch at his table, became his friend... not. It's not an acceptable prospect. It makes him too human, and this it can't be said of someone that had made a similar crime.

How someone can do harm, physical, moral, of any kind, to a creature as Penelope Garcia?

This is the big question that arises him, but also for the colleagues that are equally ignorant of the facts, that Luke however can't perceive. The only echo are those words, fragments of sentences. Until he fails to recover himself enough to ask for something in his turn.

-Where is he now?- in a damned prison, he hopes her answers. With his connections it would take very little to get an interview. At least this way he could put the question directly to the person concerned.

But JJ deprives him of this comfort. -He's dead.- he is partly angry that he was deprived of that privilege, partly relieved to know that it's no longer a threat for her.

From his mouth come out a -Good.- that could very well says a damned soul that Dante meets in his pilgrimage to Hell. How much darkness in his soul, just barely visible. Cullen, the sorrow caused to Phil and by extension to him, confusing flashbacks of the war and the same number of flash-forward about what he could have been if he hadn't adopted Roxy. He still turns again to look toward the door, but Penelope doesn't reappear. He would raise happy, sending the case to the hell, because he can't concentrate. He would do it and he wouldn't caring of what others may think of him, because it counts only that she's okay. This is love, not just love, but those with capital letter. He would be willing to cancel himself for her, and this isn't necessarily a good thing. However, he remains there, in his place.

But even when, on the plane, the angelic face of the blonde not appears on the screen and in its place, peeps an equally attractive woman, with the wheat-colored hair too, Luke decides that it's time to do something.

He would willingly remain in place of JJ. But she is the best friend of Garcia, is the one who shot Battle and sent him to his reward, she was there when it all happened, knows everything. It was the best choice leaving her at Quantico. At the same time, he can't look the other way when, gathered in the police station room, Emily call the computer technician and the expert in communications in the press answers. Rossi asks how Penelope is and the other beat around the bush, then say she is recovering, but slowly.

Luke passes the first night in Bridgewater buying a flower pot, booking it for date to be determined and a puppet heart-shaped, without any written above, but soft (as he imagines her curves are), a pillow that she could embrace in moments of sadness, and that would make her think of him.

During the second night he elaborates the strategy how to dress. He asks Jenny to prepare a white shirt and dark blue pants, along with the most elegant shoes and serious that he possesses, which he didn't use at a funeral. He also asked her to take care of Roxy a bit 'longer. The lady agrees, but first he must reveal her the reason for all this movement, including those strange parcels he received. And Luke has to put up with the enthusiastic cries of his neighbor, who is a prelude to those of his mother, when she'll knows that he finally decided.

 Everything is so perfect, in the mind of Luke Alvez, when he crosses the threshold dressed like a man, if he would look in the mirror, wouldn't recognize in himself. Yet he isn't only the ranger with boots and sports jackets. He can be even more, he can also be the one that makes the hurt heart of Garcia beats, he must be.

Outside it's raining, just little, just what its needed to give a certain atmosphere to hugs and cuddles on the couch, with a blanket to hide the bodies and movements.

He doesn't think about anything, while the elevator headed up floor by floor up to them. He doesn't think anything or at least he strives very much, while he walks throw to his fate, he tries not to feel like a condemned man who goes to meet the gallows. This isn't about court Penelope to take her to bed, the issue it's much more serious. His only objective must be to make her smile again. Make her understand that not all men are like that bastard who dared to take advantage of her. That wasn't her fault, because surely, she thinks it, that nothing justifies what he did.

He doesn't want to repeat the sentences he will tell her, the way he wants to start out. But eventually he succumbs and finds himself moving his lips without making a sound, mentally testing the part. In the noise of his thoughts, however, something new sneaks up, which he doesn't immediately recognize. A feminine, silvery, unmistakable laugh. Penelope is laughing out loud. He tries to find the source, then hears that other to make her echo, masculine. He looks up at the chiefs' offices and takes the stairs until he reaches the door, ajar, of the ex-office of Agent Derek Morgan. And he sees them, in there, sitting on the leather sofa, close, hands intertwined and eyes shining. He hears him showing his son's video, Hank, calling her "Aunt Penelope". He feels the happiness and the emotion of the woman.

And certainly, he would stay there indefinitely, dazed, until they would discover him by going out. But JJ arrives to stop hypnosis. Only when she pronounces his name the man realize that he has tears in his eyes, that he is one step away from crying.

It was all so fucking perfect. He was ready, this time he wouldn't back out, he would have done it. He was, he was; implies a past time, bygone, and no longer recoverable, changeable.

-Luke, are you okay?- the woman looks at him, she notices the droplets on the sides of his dark eyes, the mouth slightly ajar and the look lost in the void of her colleague. Just as she had noticed the interest in her friend, from the beginning, since the remote control passed after some trick of dexterity, perhaps even earlier. JJ knows perfectly well that Luke is deeply interested in Penelope, perhaps even in love. She certainly doesn't need confirmation. And because she is the one that has called Morgan, she understands that something serious has happened, that Luke is in crisis and who knows if it will be possible to solve.

He doesn't even seem to see her, he brushes her with his eyes. He is panicked. -I .. I have to... Roxy needs me.- and how it would happen in a movie, he flees. Less than ten seconds later, Garcia and her dark chocolate come out happily, arm in arm. Both immediately notice the upheaval, which has now passed on JJ's shoulders.

-Hey, blondie, what's that face?- in the beginning Derek tries to seems ironic, but the concern is revealed in his tone.

-Nothing, nothing...- she can't convince him, but however he has to take the plane, Savannah and his baby are waiting for him, so the man greets her and leaves them alone.

-JJ...- Garcia certainly doesn't intend to surrender. She has nothing better to do than to torment her poor friend. -OhMyGod.- she pronounces everything attacked, as in her best moments of anxiety. -Don't tell me that... it's about the children?- she asks first. -Or did something happen to Will?- she can't imagine what could upset JJ outside of her family.

-No. They're fine.- the other woman feels guilty for making her worry. She has just emerged from a much more serious trauma; her emotional balance is still very fragile. So, at least, their manuals teach. -It's not about me.- she adds.

Penelope opens her eyes protected by lenses and a colorful frame. -And what concerns?- the tone of voice is lower and flickering. She is afraid of what she already knows.

-You.- she swallows. -And Luke.- hearing the name of Newbie on the lips of her best friend, in a context that not certainly regards the work, cases to be solved, it's a strange experience for the computer technician. It makes her think of him as a well-rounded, real man.

-Alvez? What's he got to do with me?- she be careful to call him by surname, to keep her distance, although lately they were become a little 'closer, or for the less she has granted a bit' of truce to him. However, she blushes anyway.

-What do you really think about him, Penelope?- is the serious tone, the stern look and devoid of any kind of irony or mischievousness, and the use of her proper name, alarm the shapely woman. Why she is asking her a question like this right now? Did something happen to Newbie? No, they would have warned her in this case. There would be also the others, at this moment they would be heading towards the hospital and... Why the hell do I feel a pang in my heart at the thought that something bad could happen to him? The excuse that she loves everyone isn't enough for her, each as a member of her family. He is different, he was always being a thing apart. -I mean- JJ resumes when she understands that the other isn't going to reopen her mouth. - Do you like him?- she gets this straight, this time.

-But...!- she puts her hands to the face, in a very theatrical way. -What treacherous question!- she hides behind those exaggerated gestures, tries to protect her soul, to preserve for herself that feeling that she believed unripe, that she thought was a crush and instead she discovered in an instant is much more serious. -I have just got back from a shock, and you...- the other woman shakes her head, there is no more time for these farces, these little games.

-Garcia, please.- she limits herself to saying. And it's more enough than a thousand reproaches.

-Ok. I... I don't know.- she admits sincerely and her friend believes her. She reads the sincerity, the loss, the hope and the terror in her eyes, all mixed together. -Why are you asking me?- it's her turn to ask a question.

-He was out here.- she responds very frankly, ignoring Penelope's pupils widening as she listens to her explanation. -With a vase of flowers and a package, maybe a pillow, shaped like a heart.- she so easily can imagine this, all too easily, imagine those objects in his hands and for a moment she lost herself in trivial issues such as Which he had held in the right hand and what with the left? Then she recovers.

-What?!- there must be some other logical explanation to justify such a gesture. She can't afford to consider that hypothesis. It's the only one which she rejects a priori. But still she decides to test it, bringing it out from her world of anxieties in the real one. -You think he wanted to ask me out?- JJ can't take it and burst out laughing in her face, just a chuckle, but sufficiently strong.

-I don't think it.- she gives her that look, the one that she reserves her from Kevin's times. -I know it!- she almost screams.

-But... but... it makes no sense.- Penelope stutters. -Why then he went away?- she has denied so many times, but it took only a glimmer of hope and already she has agreed it.

-He saw you with Morgan.- her friend reveals, last surprise. Even the final piece falls into place. She can't imagine Alvez jealous of her best friend... or yes? The only time those two stalwart men had shared the room, for less than five minutes, returns in her mind. When Scratch had sent a false message to Derek, hacking her (her!) telephone. He had looked at them with that wry smile, that made her always ask what flavor could have those lips so cheeky.

-Oh, damnit.- JJ nods sympathetically. But staying here and talk to her, to summarize everything, not help anything. She glances, and they already have agreed. -I'm going.-

 He didn't cry at the end, he there was very close to gone, but hasn't dropped even a tear. Not that he was held himself in the name of some stupid stereotype, that real men don't cry. Simply he had the lump in his throat there in front of the office of Morgan, in front of the woman he loved, whose happiness had been returned by another and not by him. And along the road from the elevator to his home, the river was reduced to a trickle, just a few drops when he had finally closed the door.

Roxy, the breath of his dog was doing him to sleep. The television, never used much in this house, it enters in his head with a phrase, a series of phrases that seem written especially for him. A sing, impersonated by an Italian singer, famous in Latin America, which is certainly not a case that his mother and to his imaginary cousin, he likes to think, liked him so much.

...for those who know how to respect the time and prefer to feel bad, they don't need drugs and can speak... and recognize himself in the mirror to many seem indifferent, I recognize the dignity to those who can feel sometimes nothing...

He doesn't believe exists in the world someone who feels more nullity of him right now. Because in the end it was fair to have gone like that. Derek is better than him, He knows Garcia a lot longer, knows how to make her smile even calling her. He's not on him level.

He snuggles closer to Roxy, who moans in protest. He hugs her and dreams Penelope.

At one point the dream must be get out of hand, because he feels her heartbeat getting louder and louder, or was it his? He strives to remember the last thing he "lived" before he opened his eyes and finally succeeds: the computer technician was showing him the scar testified the gunshot she wound received, without any mention erotic implications. She allowed him to lay his hand to feel her pulse...

But what he hears it's not a heart, someone is knocking at the door.

The man walks, still dazed, uncertain. He looks through the peephole and almost faints. On the threshold of his house there is the creature of his dream.

-Hey.- she tells him as soon as Luke opens the door.

-Garcia.- he hopes to call her by name makes this less personal. Obviously, it doesn't work. He rolls his eyes, blinks his eyelids several times. No, she is always there, watching him, probably she thinks him is the idiot he is.

-I can come inside?- the tone of the woman is very sweet, mild and delicate, like it was rarely when she talks to him. The man moves away, watching her cross the threshold, and come to his mind a stupid thing, that should not concern with this situation. Vampires must ask permission to enter the house of their victims. But Garcia isn't a creature of the night, despite the pale skin... although, dressed as Dracul wife, she would be so beautiful...

-Yes, yes, sorry.- the phrase comes out with a slight delay. After all, being late is his specialty. Penelope looks around, of course she notices the aspect not lived-in feel of the home, yet she knows that Luke lived here for almost two years, there is hardly an identifying sign, only the things of Roxy, including the well-known stuff she had donated for her in the time. They are the only signs of disorder, for the rest feels like they are in a barracks. And then she notices them. A jar of flowers, balanced precariously on the edge of the table, and a heart shaped object, exactly as JJ had described them. He follows her gaze up to those things, which now appear to him as evidence, the substance of his failure. He would have to throw them in the trash, but he couldn't. He purchased them, even before he had choice them, thinking about her. He can’t get rid of it so easily as he would like.

-You had a date, with some nice girl.- the phrase she says doesn't seem a question and maybe it's not. She doesn't sound even ironic, sarcastic at times bordering on the bad, like when she told him to tell Roxy to warn her when she came in her senses, breaking up with Luke. Instead, it sounds genuine, clear. Her eyes don't seem to judge him.

-Yes... no.- the super special agent no longer in training answers stammering. -She is a beautiful girl, definitely- the only moment when he smiles -but I didn't have a date. I still had to ask her.- she isn't profiler, although she has repeatedly touted that she was profiler "by association"; but she doesn't need that skill to notice the use of a past tense, that indicating the disillusionment to have another chance.

-Why didn't you, then?- they move in two way. For those who don't know anything, she might seem like a friend, a colleague nosey who just wants to get a little 'gossip for the next day, to sauce the next day's work ahead of them spicy. But the girl whose Luke is talking is the one that he has in front of the nose, and Penelope has to repeat it herself several times, not to be jealous of herself. -What mad woman might not accept your invitation?- is the first step, the first attempt on her part to expose herself, feeling that the situation isn't balanced. She knows what she feels for him, but the man didn't, and he doesn't even know that she know... What a mess!

-I know one, and she is more than enough - Luke says bitterly. She would slap herself, for making him feel bad, but she didn't it in purpose, she didn't know...

-Oh, this bad girl broke your heart?- if she had the opportunity to observe herself from the outside, to practice the estrangement so loved by Bertold Brecht, she would laugh at herself. It's so strange perhaps she thinks herself crazy, and now in the beautiful words she thinks herself as an asshole. But she feels such, and so it's right that she describes herself in this term. She must let him know that she knows. But how big can ingenuity of a lover be?

-I think she doesn't knows how I feel about her.- he defends her promptly. Good guy to the end. She wanted to ignore it, but now can't. -She always makes everything so hard...- Penelope bites her lip, restraining herself not to stop him, now that he seems ready to open up and break the game. -... and it's for this reason that all I do is think of her... - better than JJ is right, because she wouldn't bear to discover that the unfortunate one who has turned him in this way is another woman, the one who cooked him up good. The intensity of the male gaze makes her think that maybe he has finally understood. His look literally perforates her. It's extremely sexy and serious.

-Maybe she behaves this way because she is afraid of hurt herself..-- she falters, speaking of herself in the third person. She tightens the arms to her body and does exactly that she has described. She is surprised that Roxy hasn't yet arrived to greet her. But perhaps those who seem to her hours are nothing more than few minutes and maybe that dog is so smart that she understood that this is a time that she and her master must live alone.

-I'm scared, too.- Luke bluntly admits. -But... - she makes him shut up while her voice overlapping his.

-Why you didn't ask her a date? - now the two know they are referring to her. But the play must go on again for a while.

-I wanted to comfort her, make her understand that in order to make her smile I would be willing to do anything. Although I don't know if I'm worthy to make her happy. I was able to snatch her a smile only once, when she met Roxy.- hearing appoint herself the dog raises her head, but lowers it when understanding that it's not yet time to take action. -But the only thing I can promise is that I always will do everything at best to make her happy, every day to paint a smile on her face.- the man ends his confession. That is worth almost more of an "I love you" or, considering their dialogue on a double wire, "I love her."

-So... - it's all she can say a heavily dazed Penelope.

-There was already another. I have been anticipated. I arrived late, I was on borrowed time...- now he sounds ironic and bad, to himself. -He is married and there isn't any kind of romance between them- almost more strange is to hear him describe Morgan -but I'll never live up to a such feeling.- he seemed to have partially approached, now, with the latter phrase, he is totally away, even giving her shoulders, unable to meet the woman's eyes, after he stripped in front of her, not understanding why she came to his house, why she did this theater of speech in the third person.

-Maybe you should leave her a chance to judge?- Penelope's voice caresses his shoulders, is balm for his bleeding heart, pepper simultaneously, which teases him in another way. -Prove yourself, my handsome SSA.- just an adjective, eight letters, one word. Handsome.

Luke turns around and his hands end up on the woman's face, those of Penelope do the same thing, their lips come together without anyone of them ask who was be the first to begin.

Something similar is what Penelope tells him, about an hour later, while dozing on his chest, on that same couch where less than an hour before he was maudlin from himself. -It doesn't matter being first, but getting.- Luke's hand strokes her hair, the other arm rests limply on her side. Roxy is at the bottom of their feet and seems to be asking them if they would be more comfortable on the bed. But neither of them wants to get up, even separated for only a moment, though the reconnection would be immediate.

And then they remain there, suspended in an instant without time.

TAGS: @theshamelessmanatee @itsdawnashlie @talesoffairies @janiedreams88 @kiki-krakatoa @yessenia993 @teyamarra @c00lhandsluke  @gcchic @arses21434 @orangesickle @entireoranges @jarmin @kathy5654 @martinab26 @thisonekid @thenibblets @perfectly-penelope @ambrosiaswhispers @maziikeen92 @lovelukealvez @reidskitty13 @jenf42 @gracieeelizabeth27 @silviajajaja @smalliemichelle99 @charchampagne14 @ichooseno  @ megs2219 @rkt3357 @franklintrixie @thinitta @chewwy123 @skisun @maba84 @saisnarry @myhollyhanna23 @thenorthernlytes

[autisticawesomeness-archive-blog]

I saw on your SpIn page that you like comparing written storytelling to other mediums. Do you mean like a book that was turned into a movie or something? Or could you give an example so I understand better? It sounds really interesting and close to one of my SpIns! (private response or not, doesn't matter to me)

THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME AN EXCUSE TO INFODUMP YOU WONDERFUL, WONDERFUL PERSON

And nope, that’s not what I meant (seriously, do NOT get me started on books that I’ve read that were turned into movies. it.... won’t end well), but it’s understandable confusion! 

What I meant is that every piece of media has a type of storytelling and certain narrative elements that are unique to them. Let’s compare books and movies for example: the reason you have to change books when turning them into movies is because books and movies are fundamentally different mediums. 

Books, for starters, are text-based medium. Books tell a story. While most writers know the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule, books are still ultimately told through words and not images. All images can to be described by words, but the reader will fill in the blanks with their own imagination. Books have the luxury of getting completely into the main character’s head, and can therefore make things very, very clear, by giving the character internal monologues, for example. It’s also generally understood that you’ll spend at the very least a couple of hours reading a book, most likely a couple of days, so books can go into great detail about the characters/plot/worlds, etc.

Movies, however, are a visual medium. Movies, unlike books, do not tell their story, they show it. While movies do have a point of view through which the story is told, it is usually less clear than in books; additionally, in movies, scenes can switch between characters on the drop of a hat, whereas in books, this would generally be discouraged unless you have a clear mark where the change can happen (between chapters, for example). Movies also have a shorter ‘runtime’ than books; movies can take up a maximum of three hours before the audience starts complaining that it’s too long. 

(Movies also have one other major advantage over books: audio. While certain audiobooks may have simple songs or sound effects, movies have an entire soundtrack. They have sound effects, they have hand-picked songs for scenes, they have completely new songs composed, etc. etc. The soundtrack is used to define the mood of any given scene and/or the entire movie. Depending on how good the soundtrack is, it can make or break a movie. This is not relevant to the comparison, I just wanted to point it out.)   

So, when adapting a book to movie, you will obviously need to deal with changes in medium. Because books have the time to be more detailed, movies will need to cut out subplots or even change the main plot in order to fit it into their own, much more limited, runtime. Movies also need to adapt the written descriptions to actual images; this can be a problem, if a) the fanbase is particularly picky, or b) if the directors/producers/whoever in the production staff is lazy. In addition to this, movies can show the story from more perspectives than the book usually can and/or will, so it will often give different characters a larger role in order to be more engaging to the viewer (for example, spending more time with the villain than the book does, in order to build suspense). This, too, will often lead to changes in the plot.

This is why change when adapting books to movies is necessary: ultimately, books and movies are different mediums that have different rules of storytelling, and what works in one might not work in the other. Anyone who demands that books cannot be changed when adapting to movie is quite frankly not thinking about it hard enough.

(That said, there’s also something called ‘I don’t care’ syndrome in Hollywood, where they only use big-name books to market their movie, rather than try to make it a faithful adaptation (see also: Percy Jackson). This, understandably, pisses off the fans of the book. Frankly, I hate this. If you’re gonna adapt a book, at least try and make it resemble the original, please and thank you.)

This example got out of hand, but my point is that all mediums of storytelling are unique. Some quick examples of how other mediums (can) tell stories (under the cut bc this is already way too long whoops):

Comics are a medium between books and movies, in that they are a visual storytelling device, but can spend more time on developing their characters/plots/worlds than movies, because people are willing to buy multiple volumes of a comic. 

American superhero comics are especially fascinating to me, because they’ve created such a vast universe that DC (and Marvel I’m pretty sure, though don’t quote me on it) have destroyed their entire universes multiple times just to try and get some control back over them (spoiler: it didn’t work). That stories can get so vastly out of hand seemingly without anyone noticing until it was too late is incredibly fascinating to me.

Video games are in a unique position because they are interactive; the player actively makes decisions in them. With some small examples like tabletop RPGs, visual novels (though you could argue those are games), and choose-your-own-adventure books, this is the only medium that has access to this. Because of this unique feature, they can incorporate things such as ‘karma’ endings (aka if you make bad choices you get a bad ending). They also have some other features they can utilize to make their storytelling more unique (such as the ‘save’ function, which Undertale did especially well), but I’ll leave that bc I suck at games so I know fairly little about them.

TV shows are like movies but better, imo. TV shows have the exact same advantages and disadvantages as movies, except that they have one thing movies do not: time. TV shows can take multiple episodes (the length of which varies, but serious adult shows seem to be around the 1 hour mark per episode) to tell their story, and thus they have the time to incorporate more detail/subplots than movies. Of course, this does mean that you need to learn how to pace TV shows differently than movies, and also you need to actually have the attention span to watch one (which. I do not. yikes).

Animation is yet another form of audio-visual storytelling, but this one has the added bonus of not needing to be limited by making things look ‘real’. In fact, it’s better if they do not. This makes animation one of the best types of media for fantasy/sci-fi shows that need more creative visual storytelling than live action movies/tv shows will allow.

Anime is a sub-genre of animation that I find particularly fascinating, because anime isn’t western, and therefore follows different storytelling rules than I’m used to. Just a little western animations vs anime comparison:

Western: moving characters, even in the background; animation quality is fairly consistent throughout the show (except maybe in the latter eps when they run out of budget); backgrounds are usually not that detailed; usually episodic rather than plot-driven; usually focuses primarily on humor rather than serious emotion/plot; primarily used as a medium for kids’ shows.

Anime: background is static, only lips of characters move; backgrounds tend to be very detailed; animation quality explodes during fight scenes/emotional climaxes; usually plot-driven rather than episodic; is more often used for serious storytelling than western animation; used equally as a medium for kids’ and adult shows (and can therefore delve into more mature themes than western animation generally does).

I know anime usually gets written off (at least in the west) either because people don’t like the art style or because of the ‘yaoiz/weaboo’ fanbase, but it’s a really unique medium of storytelling when it isn’t pandering to creepy men and/or pedophiles. 

(Houston the anime industry has so many issues I’m gonna cry)

I’m too new to Podcasts to know clearly what the rules, advantages, and disadvantages to this type of storytelling would be, but with the huge success of podcasts like Critical Role and The Adventure Zone, I think that there is certainly a draw to this type of storytelling that no other has. I really should start listening to see if I can figure out what it is.

So yeah that’s basically my main special interest! Lots of me thinking about what the most innovative use of HP would be in a game, what the uses of live action vs animation is, whether a certain story is better told through TV or book, etc. etc. I love it so much and PLEASE if you have any questions ask me! But! Again, thanks for asking I love infodumping!

[samstevebuckyhq]

Paragraph 79 Houses: Building a New Home in the Countryside

Have you ever found yourself dreaming about building a Paragraph 79 house?

Building your own grand design house in the countryside is a dream for lots of people; something to aspire to and daydream about. But could it turn out to be a reality?

Well, for any of these daydreams to transpire into bricks and mortar you’ll need to be fully up to speed with Paragraph 79 (or ‘Para 79’) of the National Planning Policy Framework, previously known as Paragraph 55 (or ‘Para 55’). 

This article will show you exactly how to design Paragraph 79 houses so that you can build a unique and individual bespoke house, tailored to match your needs and aspirations.

You will learn how to work collaboratively with your architects and planning consultants to increase your chances of getting planning permission for your Paragraph 79 house in the countryside or on the Green Belt.

We will show you outstanding design examples, explain the principles of good design and reveal the importance of innovative construction and sustainability methods. And if you don’t own a piece of land yet, we will also show you a step-by-step guide to help you find the best plot for developing your countryside house.

So let’s begin…

What is a Paragraph 79 Country House?

Paragraph 79 projects follow the guidelines in criterion (e) of Paragraph 79 of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) (formerly paragraph 55 of the National Planning Policy Framework), which governs the construction of new, isolated homes in the countryside. 

To begin with, paragraph 79 of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is a unique piece of legislation that provides exceptional circumstances for allowing the construction of isolated dwellings within the countryside. The policy assesses a planning application against a set of tests to ensure an exceptional quality design that reflects the highest standards in architecture. 

In fact, paragraph 79 began life back in 1997 as Planning Policy Guidance 7 (PPG7) and was introduced by then Environment Secretary John Gummer (now Lord Deben). In its earliest form, the guidance stated that:

“An isolated new house in the countryside may also exceptionally be justified if it is clearly of the highest quality, is truly outstanding in terms of its architecture and landscape design, and would significantly enhance its immediate setting and wider surroundings’. This means that each generation would have the opportunity to add to the tradition of the Country House which has done so much to enhance the English countryside”.

As years and governments have passed, PPG7 slowly transformed into Paragraph 79, but the initial framework remains. The current legislation states that a house given Paragraph 79 planning permission must:

be of exceptional quality;

be truly outstanding or innovative; 

reflect the highest standards in architecture;

help to raise standards of design more generally in rural areas;

significantly enhance its immediate setting;

be sensitive to the defining characteristics of the local area.

We will explain each of these imperatives in detail below but let’s have a look at how to obtain planning permission for a house in the countryside first.

How to Get Planning Permission for Paragraph 79 Homes

Paragraph 79 is an exception in the planning system that allows the construction of new houses in the countryside. You will be required to justify that your proposal meets the stringent requirements set out in Paragraph 79 in order to gain approval for an exceptional dwelling within an isolated setting. 

Needless to say, when preparing your planning application, you need to pay special consideration to sustainability in terms of the location of the site, the proposed building design and construction technologies; visual impact on the countryside; and landscape design. Therefore, you need to adopt a meticulous design-led approach if getting planning permission for Para 79 house is your end goal. 

Like getting planning permission in the green belt, gaining approval for an exceptional dwelling within an isolated setting can be difficult – each application brings its own unique set of challenges.

Unfortunately, there is no formula for providing a ready answer to any planning permission question for Paragraph 79 homes. Neither is there any rigorous and objective approach to assess Paragraph 79 planning applications for the criteria set out above.

The simple truth is each application has its own unique set of circumstances, which will be independently assessed by the local planning authority or the Planning Inspectorate. With the right team of professionals working on your project, you can pull out all of the stops to justify why your proposal should be granted consent. 

And once completed, your Para 79 dwelling will become part of a legacy for future generations to enjoy and gain inspiration from. Remarkably, people will benefit from the innovative, outstanding design of your property through a trickle-down effect.

The truly unique design elements of your Para 79 house will set the standard for design for years to come. Meaning this policy presents the opportunity to inspire and influence housing design of the future. Imagine what it would be like!

So now you have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of the Paragraph 79 policy, let’s look at its imperatives in more detail and learn how to design an outstanding building to improve the chances of getting planning permission in the countryside.

Paragraph 79 Policy Explained in Detail

Paragraph 79 of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) provides exceptional circumstances for permitting the construction of isolated dwellings within the countryside. The policy assesses a planning application against a set of tests to ensure the proposal meets these specific criteria of Paragraph 79.

Be of Exceptional Quality

Your planning application will be subject to rigorous analysis, but it may be of benefit to highlight your considerations about the exceptional quality of design, starting with the building. 

It sounds simple. But it isn’t.

In fact, it can be extremely difficult to pin down what is meant by exceptional quality design as exceptional quality will mean different things in different locations and settings. It will be dependent on the existing design standard and the key characteristics of that area.

However, despite there not being a clear definition of exceptional design, what is clear is that your proposal must be way above the ordinary. Not only must your proposal be unique, but you must also look to push the contemporary boundaries of construction and design methods. 

Believe it or not, the depth of understanding of Paragraph 79 will vary from council to council; therefore you should do everything in your power to ensure that your local planning authority has a strong core understanding of the policy and know how to apply it. 

Let me say this straight: Exceptional quality of design also requires the balance and integration of building design and landscape design – the marriage of structure and its topography. That is why it is crucial that you give equal consideration to the landscape design and the design of the building itself.

In other words, this isn’t just a landscape afterthought; this is landscape design front and centre to give you the best chances of winning planning permission.

Therefore, your architects should collaborate with a successful landscape architect as a part of the design team from day one as new isolated homes in the open countryside require the creation of a distinctive sense of place that fully integrates the building with its topography and surroundings. Make no mistake about it!

With attention to detail towards high design quality of the building and its harmony within its landscape settings, you can achieve an exceptional quality development that draws on its distinctive setting, whilst remaining contemporary, modern and timely. 

While the merits of exceptional design are open to subjective interpretation, there are a number of steps you can take to ensure that you have done everything in your power to achieve exceptional results. For example, early engagement and correspondence with your local planning authority and a Design Review Panel will increase your chances of your application being successful. But more about that later…

Be Truly Outstanding or Innovative 

It is important to note that the policy requires your design to be truly outstanding or innovative; not necessarily both. Previous versions of this policy, such as that outlined in the PPS7 (Sustainable Development in Rural Areas), required the proposal to be innovative and outstanding.

While your scheme doesn’t need to be both, it is recommended to aspire to both to make every attempt to increase your chances of approval.  

Here’s another way to think about it…

Paragraph 79 is the premier league of housebuilding and design – the policy wants dwellings to be at the forefront of ground-breaking design and construction and to raise the standard of design in general. 

By and large, the policy tries to reinvent traditions into something more avant-garde and contemporary, creating an opportunity for each generation to create their own legacy through outstanding architecture. This means that your outstanding design should be bold and daring, and look to celebrate the distinctiveness of the local area.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, innovation is something that dovetails with modern schemes; modernity is often assumed to be “innovative” but this doesn’t mean that traditional schemes can’t be innovative too.

In fact, innovation can be reflected in a home’s design and engineering, and it is an area that is trending big style in Para 79 schemes. The difficulty with innovation in architecture is that it demands a constant raising of the bar.

Remember: Your scheme should be a unique one-off design; repetition is not an option. Being truly innovative means doing something completely different opposed to doing the same thing but better. 

Beyond that, proving architectural innovation is not just a tough task – it is ultimately self-defeating; the risk being the creation of a generation of prototype houses that exist in their own little world, rather than raising the standard of available housing stock.

The truth is innovation in architecture demands that the wheel be constantly reinvented; it is out of the question to propose something that has already been done and claim it is innovative. The aim is to create your very own landmark structure. There is no doubt that the balance is heavily in favour of contemporary interpretations of the country house, but with a sustainable flavour, however, this does not mean that traditional schemes cannot be adopted.

But one thing’s for sure: There is not a “one size fits all approach” to innovative design. What would be considered innovative in one setting may not be considered in another; it can be very situational. It is a pointless exercise getting inspiration from previously approved schemes, because what has been considered innovative in one proposal simply will not be deemed innovative in another. 

What it all boils down to is that a clear innovative concept that has evidently driven the design of the dwelling can provide sufficient evidence to support your application. Innovative concepts can include low carbon homes, off-grid hydrogen homes and designs that incorporate green technology. Linking architecture, landscape design and mechanical and engineering often results in truly outstanding and innovative design quality. 

What’s more, Sustainability has become a golden ticket to get projects through pre-application, outline planning application and full planning application as a route to claim innovation. The sustainability agenda has become implicit since Para 79 was introduced and is a key part of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Using a sustainability consultant is commonplace, but the desire to get approved sometimes means that sustainability for its own sake overshadows a genuine design need for it.

Despite the policy itself only being short, you require a substantial amount of evidence support a Para 79 scheme. Gathering sufficient evidence to convince the local planning authority that a design is truly innovative has its challenges. Similar to exceptional quality design, what is classed as innovative is open to subjective interpretation. So it’s time to start thinking outside of the box. 

Reflect the Highest Standards in Architecture

To gain approval in the countryside, designing a beautiful home is not enough. Your home must be an expression of progressive and pioneering design fit for the 21st Century and beyond.

Therefore, a Para 79 house with the highest principles of architecture should incorporate sustainability into the building envelope by adopting heat recovery ventilation, triple-glazing, insulation, rainwater harvesting and passive solar gain etc.

Collectively these sustainability principles can be referred to as Passivhaus principles. Passivhaus design is a standard for design and construction that aims to create homes that maintain comfortable temperatures with minimal energy use. 

The fact is that Passivhaus principles are merely sensible design and something any planning officer would expect to see in a Para 79 project. However, these are not, on their own, reasons why they would automatically grant planning consent. While Passivhaus principles were innovative in the field of sustainable design when they were first introduced, they can now be considered extremely common. 

Obviously, a combination of factors will help you to justify whether your scheme helps to reflect the highest standards in architecture. If your proposal meets the other five criteria set out within the policy, then it should be well on its way to reflecting the highest standards in architecture. This following quote from a planning inspector in an appeal decision reinforces this point:

“The building would be constructed to a high level of energy efficiency incorporating many sustainable construction features including high standards of thermal insulation, rainwater harvesting, air source heating, photovoltaic panels and low energy lighting. I consider that this dwelling is of a very high standard of architecture, includes a number of innovative features, and would raise the standards of design more generally in rural areas.” (Appeal Ref: APP/N2535/W/16/3149772 – approved at appeal) 

Help to Raise Standards of Design in Rural Areas

Despite a general drive to increase the quality of design of new build homes, the reality is that the vast majority of houses in the countryside consist of mass-produced housing stock. What this means is that the large majority of new build homes are less than remarkable, cookie-cutter builds with below-par environmental performance. 

Therefore, the Paragraph 79 of NPPF has been introduced which seeks to promote “exceptional quality” homes with “outstanding” design quality in open countryside, on designated Green Belt land and for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). Paragraph 79 policy encourages developments that demonstrate quality efforts that match and compliment the environment they reside in.

In other words, policy also acknowledges the issues of typical housing design and is important in architects’ professional development. It makes them respond to a setting and produce amazing outcomes. A Paragraph 79 home should aspire to be noticed on a national stage for its use of experimental design and technologies.

In order to help raise standards of design in rural areas, your proposal must become an exemplar for outstanding and innovative rural architecture, from which future projects can take inspiration from. You can achieve this through the use of particular materials, the adoption of particular methods of construction or through conservation of the environment. 

Significantly Enhance Its Immediate Setting

A famous architect once said: “The task of the architectural project is to reveal, through the transformation of form, the essence of the surrounding context.”

You was that architect?

Vittorio Gregotti.

How that quote can apply to your project?

Best get started with it…

Quite simply, you need to start designing with context in mind. In other words, your design should not stand out but fit in! Your home must embrace its immediate surroundings and find ways to enhance it.

Having a thorough understanding of the site’s context is essential if you are going to significantly enhance its immediate setting. So it is worth really taking the time to study and assess the key features and characteristics not only of your site but also of the area in which your site is located.

For this reason, your design needs to be site-targeted. Your architects will have to extensively analyse and evaluate the context so that they can utilize it to the best of their ability within the scope of your project and Para 79 criteria required.

Besides focussing your design on context, you also need to pay particular attention to local history, and local character. Your architects need to find a balance between preserving the heritage of the setting, for example by using local materials, whilst creating designs that are modern and contemporary.

But here’s the problem… You may question whether your chosen site can actually be enhanced any further. Your chosen site will no doubt already be exceptional and beautiful due to its isolated countryside setting. However, there are a number of ways in which already beautiful sites can be enhanced.

In any case, exceptional quality design will mean different things in different locations; this can make the process complex. However, it generally ensures that your proposal fits beautifully into its surroundings. 

A successful scheme that will gain approval based on its ability to enhance its immediate surroundings should look to establish a strong connection between the structure and its surrounding landscape. No doubt about it…

All in all, if architecture is contextual, it paves the way to a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the landscape and its surroundings. All good architecture and design should seek to achieve this. Contextual design should positively respond to the physical characteristics of the site, which results in something unique… which is exactly what a Paragraph 79 should be. So, have we got that straight?

A successful scheme can be summarised in the following quote made by a planning inspector: 

“I therefore conclude that the outcome would be an attractive assemblage of the natural and man-made that would represent a significant enhancement of the immediate setting” (Appeal Ref: APP/W1715/W/16/3148910 – application approved at appeal.)

Be Sensitive to the Defining Characteristics of the Local Area

There’s only one way to justify this criteria. So let’s take a closer look…

In a nutshell, your proposal would need to clearly demonstrate that the defining characteristics of the local area, including the local and regional building materials, have been considered and accounted for within your design. Your sensible design will look to preserve and enhance the unique set of circumstances surrounding the site. 

But there’s one problem: Certain sites can be deemed too exquisite, where a new residential development in the countryside simply will not enhance the setting. Alternatively, a worn-out, run-down piece of land, regardless of topography and open countryside, is sometimes deemed not worthy of exciting and innovative building design.

As if that’s not enough, local planning authorities can be subjective and seem to move the goalposts when they grant consent.

Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of your site including its landscape features, biodiversity, ecology and its local contextual factors is critical in increasing your chances of a successful application. This will allow your proposal to be truly sympathetic to it’s unique and sensitive location. 

What to Expect When Submitting a Planning Application for  a Paragraph 79 Home in the Countryside

The planning process is so important and understanding how to work it is critical to your chances of success.

But one thing’s for sure: You should expect a difficult planning and lengthy planning process because Paragraph 79 planning is an intricate process of give and take; you will need a strong team of experts in Para 79 houses and Green Belt developments. 

I’ll walk you through the whole process…

First of all, you need to have a great team consisting of architects, town planners, landscape architects and other specialist consultants depending on your case. They will help you to navigate this complex piece of planning policy in order to secure consent for your new home. You must be prepared to listen and trust your team. We will explain the importance of this in the next chapters. 

Secondly, it is so important that the scheme is not outright rejected by the case officer; it needs to go to committee. A consistent theme during the planning process is the need to educate the planning committee about the nuances of Para 79.

If I may say so, the difference in the level of understanding varies hugely from one local authority to another. However, if you can educate that committee about the project and arrange a site visit, it will be of huge benefit.

So what’s it all mean?

If the local planning authority in question has good knowledge about Para 79, this will act in your favour, as they are more likely to approve your application. However, you can’t solely rely on their knowledge – this must be accompanied by a meticulously prepared planning application. 

On the other hand, if the local planning authority rejects your application, you have the right to appeal the council’s refusal. The case will then be overseen by the Planning Inspectorate, who will independently review the case.

Admittedly, planning inspectors are notorious for their rigorous approach to assessing planning applications; they have the best understanding of Para 79 and know how to apply it. They look very favourably on very well-prepared planning appeals. Remember; fail to prepare, prepare to fail. 

Therefore, the appeal stage is the golden opportunity to finally secure consent for your countryside home. Although appeals can take an age and cost the earth, a large proportion of Para 79 applications gain approval at the appeal stage.

Let me say this straight: There is no reason to give up on your dream home if you fall at the first hurdle. This process is a marathon, not a sprint, and you must be fully invested in this process, especially when you encounter obstacles such as a refusal.

Choosing the Right Architects and Planners for Your Paragraph 79 Project

Even if your feeling is that you don’t need a specialist Green Belt team or at the least think that that is not essential, higher approval rates are associated with meticulously developed and properly represented schemes created by leading Green Belt and Paragraph 79 architects and town planners.

2020 is the 23rd anniversary of this policy yet many great Para 79 and Green Belt architects and planning consultants still struggle to grasp the basic details, never mind the intricacies and nuance within each of the tests set within paragraph 79. 

Therefore, choosing the right architecture and planning firm for your paragraph 79 project is not far off choosing a manager for your football team – no-one comes with a guarantee of success but there are some who can display previous experience of achieving success, and some who have little experience but display all the facets needed for future success.

They will be the driving force behind your project, working with Arboricultural consultants, Ecology consultants, Sustainability consultants and more… So, make no mistake about hiring the best Paragraph 79 architects, planning consultants and professionals.

You probably already know that we here at Urbanist Architecture have a strong track record in providing architecture and town planning services for developments in the Green Belt and countryside. Over the past five years, we have delivered incredibly successful schemes for national house builders and seasoned property developers right through to first-time investors and landowners. 

As a multidisciplinary team of architects and planning consultants specialising in Para 79 houses and Green Belt developments, our structure allows us to specialise in crafting creative planning application strategies for residential developments with sensitive planning conditions and restrictions.

With a dedicated focus in developing good design with our clients and seeking collaborative negotiation with planning officers, we secure planning permissions for unprecedented and quite exceptional projects.

So now you have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of the Paragraph 79 projects, let’s look at some of this in more detail and start with how to find the best plot (if you don’t have one yet), how much it costs to submit a planning application and how much it costs to build a Para 79 House. 

Finding the Right Plot for Building in Countryside

So far, this article has established that there are a number of considerations in a successful design scheme, however, there is one element that should be prioritised above the rest – and that is the site itself.

An exceptional, outstanding site provides strong foundations upon which to build an exceptional and outstanding dwelling. The land is the only element of the site that yourself or your architect can not amend, so it is critical that you chose your site wisely. 

Let’s jump right in…

The sites most likely to gain approval for Para 79 houses are those where a former country home has been located – these sites are often referred to as ‘long-derelict country homes’.

Essentially what this means is, the former country home has been removed due to neglect or an accident and the land is empty. However, the key thing is it has been previously developed and used for residential purposes. 

In planning terms, your Para 79 dwelling would not be classed as a replacement home, but the land is being used for a similar purpose that it previously has been. A planning committee is more likely to support a scheme proposed on a site of this kind where the principle of a dwelling has been long established. Do you see where we’re going with this?

Every new countryside house approved under what is now Paragraph 79 should be exceptional quality or innovative in its nature of design. Exceptional doesn’t happen if you’re copying what has been done previously. This design test is great for architects’ professional development, but not so great for your overall approval process.

Remember: You have to also accept that a brilliantly designed new rural home will not be enough without the right site and context. You have a better chance of getting rural homes approved if there is a derelict property on the site or if the site is previously developed, or if the site is a woodland plot.

That feeling is that the perfect Paragraph 79 site should have a mythical property that it is notoriously tough to define and impossible to predict. Any Paragraph 79 architect or a team of Paragraph 79 planning consultants worth their salt will tell you that the site is of prime importance in gaining planning consent.

Does that sound rather unscientific? 

Well, it is. This is all about interpretation and feel rather than criteria. 

Local planning policies (including local land supply targets) will to some degree have an influence on the success of approval but, every submission under Paragraph 79 will likely contradict local planning policy in that it will be a new house in the open countryside, but you can look elsewhere in the policy for elements to support your case. 

It can be the case that some areas in England are more Para 79-friendly than others. Some councils may welcome this exceptional standard of development.

For example, South Cambridgeshire District Council, within their Economic Development Strategy, express an “unfulfilled demand for large high quality homes in the £1 million plus category suitable for business executives”. A policy of this kind will work in your favour when submitting an application for a Para 79 home. 

In addition to that, the site’s proximity to existing homes affects the way any approval might be considered “isolated”, but this is far from clear-cut. Common sense dictates you wouldn’t expect to see new Para 79 country houses at the end of a row of existing homes.

One such example was an application for a project in Nottinghamshire that was rejected despite meeting all the criteria outlined in Para 79; the house was literally across the road from houses in the Greater Nottingham conurbation and therefore was not deemed to be isolated.

Lots of the countryside we see as perfect for Para 79 houses is part of the Green Belt or situated within an AONB; traditionally a no-go area for local planning authorities as enshrined in all local plans. The good news is that Para 79 can trump Green Belt designations. You will need to demonstrate attention to visual impact, exceptional landscape and building design and exemplary sustainable design.

In order to secure your own piece of Green Belt land, upon which to build a Para 79 dwelling, the following criteria may help you to improve your chances of success:

Green Belt Land, ideally previously developed

Not in an existing housing development – but not (see below) too far from one either

Located within one kilometre of a train station (TfL or National Rail), roughly a 10-minute walk 

The land should not (ideally) fall under: protected under the Birds and Habitats Directives and/or designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest; land designated as Local Green Space, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty; land within a National Park (or the Broads Authority) or defined as Heritage Coast, irreplaceable habitats including ancient woodland; aged or veteran trees; designated heritage assets (and other heritage assets of archaeological interest referred to in footnote 55 of the NPPF); and areas at risk of flooding or coastal change. 

The simple truth is you can’t just buy a plot in the hope of getting Paragraph 79 approval. It’s difficult to assess why some sites gain approval and some don’t. Good quality design and a sustainable design with a minimal carbon footprint and green technology may help are some instances. Exciting and innovative building design with high-quality building materials which reflect the very highest standards of architecture and landscape may help in others. It can be a bit of a lottery.

How Much Does It Cost to Get Planning Permission for a Para 79 House?

Although every project is unique and it is impossible to calculate the professional fees of architects and other consultants without a detailed assessment, you should be prepared to invest at least £15,000 to apply for planning permission for a Paragraph 79 dwelling house. 

Purely as an indication, charges for full architects service, from conception to completion, can be calculated as a percentage of the build cost and ranges between 12% and 20% for these types of buildings. 

You may find slightly cheaper rates – however, Para 79 houses require specialist expertise, experience and design talent, and cutting costs in professional fees would not work in your favour. We probably all have memories of cutting costs and then having to live unhappily with unsatisfactory results for a long time.

For example, if your team fails to justify how your proposal meets the requirements of the Para 79 policy, you are going to be tens of thousands of pounds out of pocket, potentially with nothing to show for it. It is tough to meet the criteria of the Para 79 clause, and even if you feel you have, the decision rests with your local Planning Committee and if you appeal, then with the Planning Inspectorate. 

Therefore, selecting the right architecture and planning firm to help you prepare and present your case, and secure your Para 79 planning permission is key to minimise your risks and bring your vision to fruition.

How Much Does It Cost to Build a Para 79 House?

Paragraph 79 of the National Planning Policy Framework emphasises the need to prove the exceptional quality or innovative nature of the design of the new dwelling. 

This means that you would require to incorporate innovative construction methods and sustainability initiatives into the design of the building envelope to create a potential “Signature/Grand Design” scheme to improve the chances of obtaining planning permission. 

For this reason, the true cost of building houses to such high standards would start in the region of £3,000 per square metre and depending on the design, it may go up to £5,000 per square metre. For example, if you require a 200sqm living space, then your Paragraph 79 house cost would start from £600,000 to build.

Quite surprisingly, a relatively high number of Para 79 houses that obtained planning permission have never actually been built. Sometimes this is due to the owners of the sites wishing to cash in on their newly valuable land, but it also happens because the actual build costs became astronomical.

How to Work with an Architect to Design and Build a Para 79 Project

Firstly, be careful who you work with. An increased level of interest in and knowledge of the policy means that this is less of an exclusive club than it previously has been.

Therefore some new names in Para 79 business actually limited or no success so far. The truth is it can be difficult to know how much your architects and planning consultants know about the implications of a Para 79 process until you really start to work with them.

Many architects want to grab the opportunity to work on a Para 79 project with both hands, however experience in this field is key, when it comes to a successful scheme. 

But one thing’s for sure: You first need to take the time to have a proper initial discussion process and base it around the way they might look at a project of this type. You should examine evidence of an understanding of the importance of how they will balance the criteria of Para 79 and how they will justify your scheme. 

Don’t forget: your team will be fundamental to your success and will include the likes of architects, planning consultants, landscape architects, sustainability consultants, topographical surveyors, arboricultural consultants, transport impact assessors and other specialists depending on the requirements of your development.

Let’s dig a little deeper…

Having picked an experienced architecture and planning firm, and the rest of the team, it is time to forget what you think you know about a self-build project. One of the things you will need to understand early is that even though this is your project, to get it done you will need to accept that there will be shared-ownership of the project as it starts to fully take shape.

It is understandable that you will have a vision for the end product, however, try not to get your heart set on too many aspects of the design as your project will have to evolve organically and will be shaped by external factors. Also, you will have to make a number of changes to your design throughout this process, based on recommendations from external consultants and design review panels.  

In short, the design process for these projects is immensely more involved. When your home needs to be the crème de la crème; quality needs to be through the roof and your team needs to be in control of the arguments.

You will also have to accept that your needs and wants may need to take a backseat at least partially to the needs of the rural development area. A Paragraph 79 house design means compromise; it is not uncommon to end up with a country house that is still a fantastic piece of architectural design, but is nothing like you originally envisaged; same land, same location, but a different design using professional innovation.

So it all adds up to this: Preparing an application for a Para 79 dwelling is a truly collaborative process, which will involve the exchange of ideas and the input from a whole host of built environment professionals. Shared ownership of your scheme is the key to success. 

How to Work with a Landscape Architects and an Arboricultural Consultants

It is essential that the landscape design and the building design work in harmony with one another. In other words, physical realities of the site, including the land topography, vegetation and trees should complement with the building design.

During the planning application process, you and your dedicated team of professionals will spend time liaising with landscape architects, who will commission reports and surveys that aim to enhance your understanding of the ecology, biodiversity and the resources of the site.

This is a long process that uncovers minute but important details about not only the landscape of the site but animals, prevailing wind direction, sunlight, climate and geology amongst other things. 

So what does all this mean?

The plans produced by landscape architects help to develop the narrative behind the dwelling design and articulate the contextual relationship of the house and its surroundings.

The more time is spent on understanding a site and its context the stronger this narrative becomes, allowing a more responsive design to emerge. Therefore, engaging with a successful landscape architect will allow proposals to be sketched up that positively respond to the landform. 

Ensuring you involve a talented landscape architect from the outset allows them to lay down some rules about the site. There are a number of ways in which your proposal can enhance the landscape including:

Forming a relationship between interior and exterior spaces through the complementation of architecture and topography;

Binding the site together using woodland;

Linking up habitats; 

Bolstering the woodland edge;

Introducing wildflower areas and a quality mowing regime to promote biodiversity;

Putting management plans in place for all areas.

In fact, the landscape of your site can become a major part of your overall design concept, therefore it is important that you consider how your home will integrate into the landscape. You should consider landscape design as a fundamental component of your project, underpinning the whole scheme. 

Let’s not forget: The aim of Paragraph 79 homes is to celebrate the diversity of the English landscape. Therefore it is crucial that the architecture takes its design notes from the landscape and its rich defining features. The Planning Inspectorate often comments on landscape design within their appeal statements; 

“The important point about this proposal would be the combination of features and opportunities offered on the site which would combine to form an integral part of its design. Overall, the design would embrace the site’s physical characteristics in terms of the contours of the land, its orientation and views towards the ponds. It would be of an exceptional quality.” (Appeal Ref: APP/M1710/W/15/3010471 Wishanger Estate, Smithfield Lane, Headley Down, Bordon, East Hampshire GU35 8ST – scheme approved at appeal). 

Landscape architects and arboricultural consultants will assess the impact of your development on trees and landscape features on your site. Quite simply, the local planning authority will look favourably on your application if you have considered the care and management of these features. 

Not only is it important to create a strong narrative between the scheme and the landscape, you must also be able to develop a strong narrative between your proposed scheme and yourself. The personal narrative, between yourself and your new home, is of equal importance as the site narrative.

The understanding must go beyond the layout and the number of bedrooms proposed. Successful applications will include detail on how you plan to make effective use of the landscape, how you plan to move through it and what personal connection, if any, you have to the site. A strong and compelling personal narrative will help those assessing your application to gain a rich and meaningful understanding of how you will make the most of this exceptional piece of landscape. Just imagine that…

Here’s the point: Your Para 79 proposal should represent a design that addresses the complementary relationship between architecture and existing site features. Your proposal must display a thorough understanding of the local landscape issues and present your case in the best light all of which will have a huge influence on your project’s success.

That is why, a holistic landscape design key is gaining the support of the local planning authority and the Planning Inspectorate, so is not something to be overlooked or neglected in the planning and design process. 

Should I Use Design Review Panels?

Oddly enough, significant cuts to local authority budgets have meant that many councils no longer employ in-house design teams. Subsequently, key design decisions are being made by planners who lack both the knowledge and the experience to make a sound judgement on whether a proposal meets/reflects the highest standards of architecture.  

Although it is up to the final judgement of the local planning authority to establish whether a design meets the standards specified in the policy, we highly recommend the use of design review panels. 

Basically, a design review panel is an independent advisory body of highly distinguished built environment practitioners. They offer impartial advice and guidance on design issues related to new and emerging development typically at the pre-application stage. The expert knowledge and advice from the review panel can be instrumental in securing planning permission for your Para 79 home.

In short, Design Review Panel provides evidence for proving the ‘exceptional’ nature of your project. The members of the panel will provide impartial expert advice about the design of your proposed home, which can prove invaluable when it comes to putting together a full planning application. 

In previous cases, the Planning Inspectorate has given great weight to feedback from the design review panel, therefore, engagement with a design review panel is crucial. Also, the panel itself will commend you for bringing your proposal forward for review at an early stage. 

Obviously, the report the panel produces will help to prove how the highest standards in architecture have been met within your design, however, it will also include design recommendations that will increase the likeliness of your application being approved by the local planning authority. This is why early engagement is crucial, as amendments can be made to the design whilst it is still fluid. 

Remarkably, there are endless benefits to using design review panels as part of your application, all of which should be given great consideration in the early stages of your project. Having the support of a professional design team, as part of your application, can significantly increase your chances of securing planning permission for your dream Para 79 home.

How Likely Are You to Get Planning Consent?

First, you must establish whether the site has the right ingredients to achieve planning consent. All tests of the Para 79 must be met to secure planning permission – however, there is rarely a consistent approach adopted by local planning authorities to assess if these tests have been met.

Let me explain…

A planning decision can be made at various levels; under delegated powers, at committee or at appeal. A report, appraising the proposal, will be produced at each one of these stages. Within the report will be justifications for the officer, committee or planning inspector’s decision.

Believe it or not, the majority of Para 79 applications are decided at the committee level, as most planning officers will typically refer the application to a planning committee when they believe it does not meet the Para 79 criteria.

Let’s not forget: Planning consent is never guaranteed; however, all developments must be decided on the planning balance qualitatively rather than quantitatively. The interpretation of the policy can be seen to rely heavily on subjective criterion, meaning there is the opportunity for the application of varying definitions of what constitutes “exceptional” or “innovative” to create conflicts and contradictions from place to place.

The success or failure of your planning application will be affected by a multitude of factors relating to the materials submitted and existing site circumstances of any project.

This chart provides a clear indication of the resulting success rate of Para 79 planning applications; in 2018, 52% of applications were approved and 34% refused. 

For example, for projects in the Green Belt, there is the principle of openness. If your site has other buildings on it, one option is “consolidating building form”. If there aren’t buildings, the process may be more difficult.

For instance, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) are clearly protected by strict national policy. This doesn’t mean that it is not possible to get approval, but it is far more complex to build on these pieces of land.

Another example is that if your site is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) or on top of any hill, your development will have a huge visual impact. Hence, the chances will be slim to get planning consent. If you are able to minimise this visual impact, your chances will be significantly improved.

The good news is the NPPF now requires all councils to demonstrate a five-year housing land supply, which essentially means they must be able to prove they have enough land to supply five years worth of housing needs. If a council is unable to demonstrate this, then this can be of benefit to your project. Quite simply, your home will be positively contributing to the council’s housing supply and helping them to meet their housing target. 

Bottom Line

Paragraph 79 of National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) seeks to raise the bar in terms of quality when building in the countryside or on the Green Belt. The planning process of your development will be both time-consuming and exacting; however, it is an exciting route to navigate, and living in the countryside in your special house will offer you a quieter, more peaceful and more relaxing life. 

The majority of Britain’s most beautiful landscape is under protection and subject to strict regulation and control. But Paragraph 79 presents a unique opportunity to get around these regulations and build something extraordinary. 

Para 79 houses are not for everyone, however, if you are looking for a bespoke, innovative home of outstanding quality, that is both sustainable and futureproof, then it is worth exploring this planning avenue. Imagine what it would be like to have a unique opportunity to create your own tailor-made living environment that suits your needs. Astonishing, isn’t it?

We are a good fit if…

You prefer a custom, one-size-does-not-fit-all approach. 

You are passionate about good design.

You are interested in massively effective projects that are delivered on time and need minimal revisions.

You need an expert, strategic, multidisciplinary chartered architecture firm, and not just the cheapest provider.

You are more interested in receiving an exceptional service than a low-end, perfunctory one.

You want to work with a firm who will fearlessly stand with you as true believers in your proposal’s mission.

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The post Paragraph 79 Houses: Building a New Home in the Countryside appeared first on Urbanist Architecture - London Architects.

source https://urbanistarchitecture.co.uk/paragraph-79-house/

[aditisingh123]

HOW TO PERFORM SHOPIFY SPEED OPTIMIZATION?

Shopify has become one of the most popular e-commerce software solutions for many online retailers, and customers have come to expect extremely fast load times that create smooth and easy shopping experiences. The best ECommerce Platform that helps you to Sell Online, make purchases, or keep shoppable social media. Also, you can customize your eCommerce Software as per business needs with Shopify store and plugins. Shopify as a platform is easy to set up & use and creates a visually appealing online store. There are numerous app integrations and have high security and reliability in this platform. You can get powerful marketing tools, mobile responsiveness, outstanding customer support, and an easy monetary payment. Your site execution straightforwardly impacts your site’s capacity to change over clients. The quicker your site is, the more clients you are probably going to change over. To improve your site you need Shopify speed optimization   SHOPIFY POS Shopify is a business platform that permits anybody to set up an online store and sell their items. Dealers can likewise sell their items face to face with Shopify POS i.e. Shopify point of sale. Shopify began once again ten years back when our originator Tobi needed to sell snowboards with his organization then called Snow fallen angel. He immediately acknowledged it was unimaginably testing to sell snowboards online without simple to utilize the internet business stage. So he chose to make it himself, and Shopify was conceived. Shopify is currently the main trade stage intended for organizations, everything being equal. Regardless of whether you sell on the web, via web-based networking media, coming up, or out of the storage compartment of your vehicle, Shopify has you secured. The first Shopify store was our own, and it’s been a crucial improvement trade for everybody from that point onward. HOW TO CHECK THE SPEED OF YOUR SHOPIFY STORE? We are going to separate a couple of approaches to examine your site utilizing apparatuses; clearly, following the recommendations that are given will frequently improve your site. SITE SPEED AND PERFORMANCE OPTIMIZATION If you have any type of website, the optimization is important, but even more — for eCommerce sites because it can directly affect sales. It was found that as many as 40% of online customers will leave a site that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. And it was also found that the admissible wait time for a page to load in 2 seconds. Anything longer than that, and customers describe it as a negative experience. It’s a good idea to test your pages to see how quickly they load. Improving load time, even by 1 second, can make a huge difference to your customers’ experiences and your sales conversions. These tools will allow you to see your site’s performance and the areas for which optimization is recommended. Although, those improvements may necessitate a change in code. GTMETRIX GTmetrix is a free instrument that breaks down your page speed execution and grades website pages from A to F and gives you proposals to handle. With Gtmetrix by tapping on the “Waterfall” tab, we can see the specific measure of time each solicitation took to satisfy. Track your performance over time with Gtmetrix. It gets you notified when your page is slow. Set up an alert and get notified when your page underperforms. It will send you an alert linked to a full report so you can know what happened. Also, get a detailed assessment with: PageSpeed and YSlow scores and Recommendations Page Load Details (time, size, number of requests) Various Analysis Options Waterfall, Video and Report History TEST MY SITE Google likewise suggests running your site through the Test My Site Tool where you can break down both portable neighborliness and versatile page speed. Head over to Test My Site to attempt it. PAGESPEED INSIGHTS PageSpeed Insights tool by Google produces PageSpeed score and PageSpeed proposals for your pages to make your site quicker. The Insights analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page speedy. The apparatus uncovers the basic components for versatile and work area independently likes: Enhance pictures. Minify CSS. Minify JavaScript. Wipeout render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in over the-crease content. Influence program reserving and Reduce server reaction time. Abstain from presentation page diverts. Gzip pressure. PINGDOM TOOL Pingdom will test the load speed of your site FREE and give proposals on the best way to make a site rapid. This tool built this Website Speed Test to help you analyze your website load speed. The test is designed to help make your site speedy by identifying whether a webpage is fast, slow, or big. In short, this tool wanted it to be an easy-to-use tool built to help webmasters and web developers everywhere optimize their website performance. WEB PAGE TEST It is a website page and optimization test is a platform that helps in site optimization. You should run a free website speed test from around the globe using real browsers at consumer connection speeds with detailed optimization recommendations. WHY LOADING SPEED ISSUES OCCUR IN YOUR SHOPIFY STORE? EXTERNAL SHOPIFY THEME FILES Developers of Google have created a process referred to as “minification.” This process helps you remove poorly coded CSS, HTML, and JavaScript on your web page, which may slow your site’s performance. Outside JavaScript and CSS can likewise strife or “contend” with other JavaScript or CSS records required by either the Shopify stage or your Shopify topic. This will make components not show up needless to say or influence highlights to “break.” • JavaScript clashes are probably the foremost widely recognized explanations behind highlights breaking on Shopify stores and frequently are going to be best investigated by the appliance engineer. • CSS, then, depends vigorously on what’s known as explicitness or “need” of what code is applied to a particular component to make it look a specific way, and it’s moderately simple for a style included by an application or outsider coordination to incidentally changing how things look. SHOPIFY APP CONFLICTS • Application developers won’t have envisioned or tried each condition, variety, or topic, which may cause configuration issues or broken usefulness or links. • It’s additionally conceivable that if your store has one of a kind needs, plan, or usefulness, an application can add multifaceted nature that requires investigating to determine issues. CODE IS NOT CLEAN The developers haven’t adopted proper coding format or haven’t used clean code, then it can also make your site slower. A few of the common mistakes in the site code are excessive white spaces, inline stylings, empty new lines, and unnecessary comments. Reduce some unnecessary elements from the code and then compress the code that will reduce the file size and the overall page speed. It can also help in a boost in SEO rankings. Tips: Use inline CSS but to a limited extent Don’t create multiple CSS stylesheets UNOPTIMIZED IMAGES While we’re talking about page speed, it’s additionally worth investigating picture documents since these, very similar to CSS and JavaScript, are “outside” records that ought to be stacked and eventually influence stacking time. Images on the online-only got to be 72 dpi (rather than the upper 300 dpi required for print, for example) so that they can usually easily be kept well under one megabyte. Analyze the pictures of your site. Any image of quite 1MB isn’t acceptable. JPEG images are smaller in size compared to other image formats like PNG, GIF, and NextGen image formats like WebP. Tip: Make use of TinyJPG and TinyPNG instead of other formats, especially for high-resolution images. TOOLS FOR IMAGE OPTIMIZATION: •  OPTIMIZILLA This online image optimizer uses a sensible combination of the simplest optimization and lossy compression algorithms to shrink JPEG and PNG images to the minimum possible size while keeping the specified level of quality. •  CRUSH.PICS The crush pics Balanced Compression algorithm strikes the right balance between quality and image size. By brilliantly calculating just what proportion to use to every image, It ensures that the new image looks as close as possible to the original. THE MOST EFFECTIVE METHODS TO REINFORCE THE SHOPIFY STORE FOR SPEED – To improve your Shopify store’s SEO, performance is a small ranking factor in Google’s algorithm. The performance impacts all of your other digital marketing initiatives. Whether it’s paid marketing, email marketing, or social marketing, your website speed will impact users from all different channels. If your site is receiving a fair amount of traffic from the channels, then even just a small improvement in performance can result in noticeable revenue improvements. COMPRESS YOUR PICS: E-trade sites are ordinarily pictured substantial, which would gradually be able to down website page load occasions if item pictures or various pics aren’t compacted. JPEG photos commonly have a little bit of document estimation than PNGs, which are a higher structure when you require a conspicuous foundation. Scaling your photographs down to the fantastic measurement can moreover diminish record estimation and shave off some site page load time. ACTUALIZE LANGUID STACKING EXECUTION: Lazy stacking licenses shop traffic to stack photographs as they scroll through your website page as opposed to at the same time, which would bring about longer forthright burden times. “It’s immensely helpful for developers to place in power by and large,” Long stated, suggesting the lazySizes Library, which he utilizes on his own customers’ Shopify destinations. EMPOWER GOOGLE AMP: Google AMP is an exertion by utilizing Google to smooth out the website page stacking pace on any gadget. It utilizes an open-source coding system. See our article Enabling Google AMP to investigate how to rehearse it to your store. BE CONSERVATIVE WITH YOUR APPLICATIONS: When you have a web-based business website, and you favor having the entirety of your particular issues — your spring up notices and your chatbot and these exceptional highlights — that is going to come at a tradeoff of site page speed. Shopify applications make additional solicitations and can add to the site page swell, hindering your site online for clients. To select which applications do not merit keeping, ask, “‘Does this application pressure cost to us? Does it improve the customer experience? Does that help with changes? Is it, in all actuality, worth including, or is it basically an assortment of lovely to have?’ and if it’s the last mentioned, consider pushing off it”. You can significantly speed up a Shopify site, by following these steps: Choose A lightweight theme Reduce Large Image Sizes Compress Images Replace GIFs With Static Images Lazy Load Images Limit Third-Party JavaScript & Shopify Apps Migrate tracking codes To Google Tag Manager Run Your Store through Google PageSpeed Insights LESS WORKER REACTION TIME: One of the greatest variables in how rapidly your page loads is the measure of time your DNS query takes. A DNS, or space name framework, is a worker with a database of IP addresses and their related hostnames. At the point when a client types a URL into their program, a DNS worker is a thing that interprets that URL into the IP address that demonstrates its area online. A DNS query, at that point, is the procedure of finding a particular DNS record. You can consider it your PC looking into a number in a telephone directory. LIMIT TIME TO THE FIRST BYTE: Notwithstanding the measure of time, it takes for your page to completely stack, you’ll additionally need to investigate the measure of time it takes to begin loading. Time to first byte, or TTFB, is the measure of time a program needs to hold up before getting its first byte of information from the worker. Google suggests a TTFB of under 200 ms. Unlike a ton of the front-end execution factors most site proprietors center around, this is a worker side concern. At the point when a client visits your site, their program sends an HTTP solicitation to the worker that has it. Three stages need to occur between that underlying solicitation and the main byte of information: 1. DNS query 2. Worker preparing 3. Reaction LIMIT HTTP DEMANDS: According to Yahoo, 80% of a Web page’s heap time is spent downloading the various pieces of the page, similar to pictures, templates, and scripts. An HTTP demand is made for every last one of these components, so the more on-page segments, the more it takes for the page to render. The initial step to limiting your solicitations is to make sense of what number of your webpage as of now makes, to use as a benchmark. If you use Google Chrome, you can utilize the program’s Developer Tools to perceive what number of HTTP demands your website makes. DETERMINE PICTURE MEASUREMENTS: Your program starts to deliver a page before pictures are stacked. Indicating picture measurements causes it to fold over non-replaceable components. On the off chance that no measurements are determined, your program will reflow once the pictures are downloaded. To do that in <img> components, use tallness and width labels particulars.

[casualarsonist]

Assassin’s Creed: Origins first impressions

Yes, once again it’s time for me to play 20 hours of a game and only be able to give a ‘first impressions’ review, because in this day and age if you’re not able to play a game like a full-time job then are you even playing at all?

I must admit though, for all their flaws as a developer and as a publisher, Ubisoft have, for the last few months at least, given me some of the most consistent gaming enjoyment that I’ve experienced in a while, and it’s due in no small part to the marked increase in quality in their recent releases. It started with Far Cry 5, which I will talk about once I’ve finished it, and continues with Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which is easily one of the top three games in the series. 

However, (and we’re talking about Ubisoft here, so of course there’s a ‘however’) there’s something I want to talk about first, and that’s a little thing I call the ‘Ubisoft Enjoyment Curve’. 

If the title isn’t self-explanatory enough, the UEC is a visual representation of my enjoyment when playing a Ubisoft game, and it’s a pattern that is consistent among most of their games in most of their franchises. If one were to do a shitty MSPaint drawing of it, it would look a little like this:

This particular mock-up pertains specifically to AC games, but generally speaking, the UEC tracks a boring tutorial followed by a sharp increase in enjoyment as the world opens up, followed by a plateau when one starts getting into the repetitive gameplay loop. This is followed by a sharp decrease in enjoyment as the loop gets tedious, ending on a low as the final battle underwhelms. My experiences with Ubisoft games tend to follow this exact same pattern every time because the company consistently manage to do certain specific things very well, and certain specific things very poorly. For example, no-one designs an open-world like Ubisoft. While the world of, say, The Witcher 3 is a stunning place filled with gorgeous visual detail, it’s still a collection of discrete zones that can only be travelled between via loading screens. Origins, however, is one enormous, stunning, and SEAMLESS representation of Hellenistic Egypt, and somehow it performs like a dream. When the game first offered me a mission to leave the starting village of Siwa and travel to a different city, I finished everything there was to be done because I was convinced that, like Assassin’s Creed 2, for example, I’d be transported to another self-contained city sandbox, cut off from the rest of the world. So imagine my surprise where I realised you could just ride from one end of the country to the other on horseback, and as soon as I was loaded into Alexandria, I could turn right around and walk straight back to Siwa if I wanted to. You can gaze across the deserts surrounding Giza and see the glorious lighthouse at Alexandria towering on the horizon miles  in the distance, and if you want, you can make a beeline for it and rarely encounter stuttering and pop-in, with nary a loading screen at all. This technical sorcery is one of Ubi’s greatest strengths as a developer, and although, for example, Black Flag had attempted something like this in their open world, the fact remains that that world is a collection of islands, lacking even half the detail and landmass featured here. Even the most recent game before Origins - Syndicate - took place in the city of London alone. A large city, but much less a ‘world’ and more a ‘zone’. So once one slogs through the grind of the mandated Ubisoft tutorial (as if you’re not just playing practically the same game as you were ten years ago), the enjoyment spike that comes along with exploring the expanding world is dramatic. 

But then, after a few hours of running round on an exotic virtual holiday, they hit you with the god-awful present-day missions. Now it’s not that I object to the meta-narrative - failing to adequately follow-up Desmond Miles’ storyline is actually one of the series’ greatest mistakes, in my opinion. The promise of that story, and in particular (SPOILERS) the stunning and fantastic anti-climax for Ezio Auditore at the end of his life’s search for the secrets of Eden, as the Ancients delivered their message through him and over hundreds of years of time to Desmond, was one of the main reasons I was so excited for the follow-up entries following Ezio’s retirement as a character. But it’s specifically because they’ve failed to give the player any reasonable incentive to care about the meta-narrative that these missions are so unbearable. I mean, there’s also next-to-nothing to do in them, but it’s unsurprising that a lack of compelling storytelling begets a lack of compelling gameplay. I genuinely think that they could have thrown that shit out entirely with this entry - I would have been more relieved than anything if they had - and while I can’t comment on how this particular story develops, there seems to be little, if anything, going on as far as I’ve played. It’s more engaging than the confusing, entirely cutscene-based meta-story of Syndicate, but still, the present-day portions of Origins that I’ve played so far take place in a tiny, relatively featureless environment that offer little more than an annoying distraction from the true wonders of the game. 

After leaping back into the past, however, it isn’t long before the comfortable familiarity of the AC formula and the wonder of the game world begins to offer diminishing returns. Because once one has explored enough of the map, it becomes pretty clear that whatever changes Ubisoft have made for this entry are ultimately pretty superficial - Egypt may be beautiful to look at, but in many ways it’s like the pre-rendered backgrounds of old in that there’s little by way of interactivity here. At its core, this Assassin’s Creed game is fundamentally the same as that Assassin’s Creed game, and you’ve probably got another 50 hours ahead of you before you’ve finished with it. And while this plateau in enjoyment can hold out for 5, maybe 10 hours, eventually, always, the repetition of the gameplay and the lack of true content always gets the better of me, and rather than investing in what I’m doing, I start enjoying my time less and less. I stop listening to what the characters have to say and just perform side missions by rote, and I’ve noticed that, for all the talk of Origin’s side-missions being more developed than in other AC games, this is only superficially true, and it still falls into the old trap of cut-and-paste content. On the surface, it would like you to think that the old dog has learnt new tricks, but when you find yourself unlocking a cage and carrying a captive out of an enemy camp for the twelfth time you’ll see that Origins still embodies some of the longest-standing flaws of the series as a whole. And it’s all the more annoying because the repetition in the side content doesn’t necessarily have to be such an issue, but as always, the busywork still ends up taking up an enormous amount of your time in-game, vastly outweighing the time spent engaging in any kind of story-related content, and it saps away a lot of the life the game might otherwise have.  

So, with that said, what does the game do right?

The story begins in media res, and it does a fairly good job of catching the player up on the history of the main character - Bayek - and why he has you doing the things you’re doing. While it might initially felt like I’d skipped past interesting parts of a bigger story, I can’t help but feel like there is so much more to be revealed that I don’t know about yet, and this parallels the journey of Bayek himself, who begins the game equally ignorant as to how deep the conspiracy he has found himself embroiled in goes. For what I’ve seen, the game takes a rather hands-off approach to telling its story, as opposed to, say AC2, which leans into its historical figures and has a lot of fun with its fictionalised version of history. Origins opts instead to spend as little time as possible explaining its story via cutscenes, and throws the player into the doing rather than holding them up with the telling, and in my opinion it could have afforded to play with its history more. But again, I’m not sure how much of the story I’ve played so I can’t comment on how this changes later on. 

The time period of the setting is absolutely inspired as well, and depicts Egypt when it was the point of intersection of three diverse cultures - the Greek, Egyptian, and Romans all meeting as civil war stirs between the armies of Cleopatra and her brother/husband (yeah) Ptolemy XIII. This incredible time in history lends the game an immense diversity of both architecture and people, and the player gets to experience the joy of interacting with these, and playing the lynchpin of the political machinations of some of the most fascinating figures ever to have lived. 

Another area in which Origins excels over its previous games is the interaction between its various gameplay systems, and while it isn’t anywhere as detailed as say, something like Far Cry 2 in terms of emergent gameplay, it’s still a step up over previous entries. For example, I’ve seen soldiers affected by beserk darts crack open cages holding rebel prisoners, who have then gone on to cause extended chaos amongst the soldiers protecting a stronghold, leaving me free to slip in and out unnoticed. Sleep darts thrown into fires will explode in a cloud of sedative gas and knock out handfuls of people at a time. Poisoning corpses and wandering away can result in you returning to a dozen dead bodies strewn over the place as guards investigating dead comrades have carried disease back to their living counterparts. Tense battles can and will be interrupted by crocodiles or hippos racing in and devouring your enemies. Punt boats can be set on fire and sunk from under the people standing on top of them, or rammed and tipped, leaving their pilots swimming for their lives. Oil jars can be thrown into water, broken, and the spreading oil slick ignited. On multiple occasions I’ve avoided danger because the person who spotted me dropped dead on the spot with disease, or was attacked by a predator in the process of attacking me. I wish the game had gone farther with its fire mechanics, and I suppose in the grand scheme of things it feels a little half-hearted in terms of its implementation of some of these ideas, but still, it’s better than it has ever been. 

Origins also has the tidiest implementation of its climbing mechanics of any AC game yet. There’s a far more definitive use of  ‘press X to climb, press O to drop’ that leaves little room for you to be unsure as to whether you need to hit one or the other to scale that small ledge. The game is also much more forgiving in terms of which surface it will let you climb and where - as a result, Origins is much less a puzzle-climber than other games in the series, and it’s rare that you’ll end up getting stuck on something because the designers have simply decided that you’re not allowed to cling to that particular thing above your head. They also removed the infuriating restriction on jumping that was a particularly frustrating part of Syndicate - the one that completely stops you from leaping from ledges above a certain height - meaning that you’re free to leap to your death if you CHOOSE to, because this is 2018 and I should be able to make my characters commit suicide if I damn well want to. These movement tweaks open the way for more free-flowing experience, and allow for instinctive and reactive control by the player: if you’re chasing someone transporting resources and they disappear inside a stronghold, you don’t have to spend the next five minutes wandering around the perimeter looking for an entry point only to find that you can’t get down from the wall you just climbed - now you can just just take it in your stride and continue hunting your prey. 

These small quality-of-life improvements make a big difference to the overall feeling of ‘tracking and attacking’ (trademark, me, 2018), particularly when combined with the overhauled combat. No-longer is the combat system a poor-man’s knockoff of the Arkham series; instead you have direct control over blocking, light and heavy attacks, dodging and parrying, and characters are free-moving with the ability to lock on. It’s a bit more button-mashy, but you don’t have to spend your time waiting for the enemy to attack; instead it encourages movement and pressing the initiative. You’re even able to equip up to four weapons, including two bows that operate as a stealthy and fully-featured replacement for the pistols/throwing knives that appeared in the previous games. In response to this, enemy awareness has been ramped up, meaning that even the quietest assassinations will alert any guard close enough to you, and you can and will be spotted fairly quickly if you creep without care. That said, even on hard, the game becomes easy as soon as you level up higher than the enemies around you, but you’re offered a menu option to make enemies level up with you, and for those that want the game to keep pushing them (and I’d say it’s necessary to hold off some of the tedium of the gameplay routine) I’d recommend it.   

Lastly, I’d like to go into greater detail about the world design. From the gorgeous Mediterranean waters of Alexandria, through the verdant Nile Delta areas, to the desolate sands of the southern deserts, and the immense and haunting Giza pyramids, the game’s visuals are every bit the pinnacle of Ubisoft’s efforts. It can’t be overstated how amazing Origins looks, and there’s so much joy to be taken from simply standing and looking around, or touring the backstreets and bazaars and temples and cobbled carriageways. In a game like this it’s easy to get buried by the repetition and fail to see the forest for the trees, so it’s certainly a joy to snap out of that every now and then and just go for a walk and admire the level of detail on display. More than Syndicate with it’s rows and rows of similar buildings, or Black Flag and Rogue with their giant stretches of water, Origins feels like a world designed by hand and with care. Every surface and texture feels like it was placed with intention, and it gives you that very ‘Assassin’s Creed’ feeling in which you wonder just how close to the design the reality of the place actually was. 

Collectively, my first impressions are skewed quite positive, although even now I’m finding myself falling prey to a fatigue common to my experience with these games. Taking the extra year for development has certainly done it some good - it’s clear that the ambition and quality in its presentation has increased with the increase in development time, and that a few fresh ideas have managed to penetrate the wall of executives that make all the decisions for this type of thing. But one shouldn’t be misled - Assassin’s Creed: Origins is still the same old Assassin’s Creed, and if there’s any core feature of the series that you despise, chances are you’re going to run into it here. That said, it still remains one of the best games they’ve made. It’s huge, detailed, gorgeous, open-ended, with visceral and bloody combat, a number of entertaining systems that interact to hilarious effect. When it works, it works really well - it’s fun. But it does suffer from the fact that the size and scale of the game means more faffing about with relatively meaningless busywork, and it’s this repetition that dulls the shine of the world around you. In some ways it feels more of a throwback to older AC games whilst still having some new ideas of its own, but when it comes down to it, it’s the latest AC game. So...get it if you like AC games, I guess? Because it’s the latest one.